Answers grounded in what we verified first-hand on hide.me and in the real review data on this site.
hide.me's privacy policy states it does not log VPN sessions, browsing behavior, visited websites, or IP/timestamp pairs tied to your connection — and the company says that claim has been independently audited by Securitum since 2015, repeated yearly. It's worth knowing the policy also discloses a separate, non-persistent troubleshooting log (a random username plus internal IP) erased every few hours — a normal operational log, and a different thing from activity logging, but a detail worth reading for yourself in the full review.
hide.me is incorporated in Malaysia, which sits outside the 5-Eyes, 9-Eyes and 14-Eyes intelligence-sharing alliances that many competitors' home countries belong to. Jurisdiction determines what a government can legally compel a company to hand over — it's a structural factor separate from whatever a company promises in its marketing.
hide.me's Stealth Guard feature is a per-app kill switch that, per hide.me's own description, automatically cuts your internet connection if the VPN drops, rather than silently falling back to your unprotected connection. Our review dataset does include some complaints about connection stability, so a kill switch matters in practice, not just on paper.
hide.me states on its own About Us page that its free plan carries no ads, no data-selling and no throttling, and that it's covered by the same audited no-logs policy as paid plans. It's capped on monthly data, but it's a genuine ongoing free tier rather than a disguised time-limited trial.
hide.me says yes: first audited in 2015 (among the first VPN providers to do so), and re-audited yearly since, most recently by Securitum, a European security firm. hide.me also publishes an annual transparency report (since 2013) and holds VPN Trust Initiative accreditation — see the cited quotes on our review page.
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