Although many VPNs invest a great deal of time and effort in boasting about their privacy credentials, Psiphon is a little more honest. Point your browser at the service’s Privacy Policy and this is what you'll read at the top of the page:
"Psiphon is designed to provide you with open access to online content. Psiphon does not increase your online privacy, and should not be considered or used as an online security tool."
Privacy Policy
Psiphon is committed to protecting the privacy interests of its customers, end users, distributors and suppliers. This Privacy Policy is intended to provide you with general information on how your personal information may be used. Psiphon is a Canadian corporation with its head office located in Ontario, and our Privacy Policy has been developed to reflect Canadian and Ontario privacy laws and statutes.
Psiphon is designed to provide you with open access to online content. Psiphon does not increase your online privacy, and should not be considered or used as an online security tool.
What user information does Psiphon collect?
From time to time Psiphon may have to record additional information in order to resolve a problem with our service. When this occurs, we will add an entry to the Privacy Bulletin describing what was recorded, how long it was kept, and why.
Psiphon Client Software
Advertising Networks
We sometimes use advertisements to support our service, which may use technology such as cookies and web beacons. Our advertising partners' use of cookies enable them and their partners to serve ads based on your usage data. Any information collected through this process is handled under the terms of our advertising partners' Privacy Policies:
Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics on some of our websites to collect information about usage. The information collected by Google Analytics will only be used for statistical analysis related to your browsing behavior on this specific website. The information we obtain from Google Analytics is not personally identifying, nor is it combined with information from other sources to create personally identifying information.
Google Analytics plants a permanent cookie on your web browser to identify you as a unique user the next time you visit the website, but this cookie cannot be used by anyone except Google, and the data collected cannot be altered or retrieved by services from other domains.
Google’s ability to use and share information collected by Google Analytics about your visits to this website is restricted by the Google Analytics Terms of Use and the Google Privacy Policy. You may choose to opt out by turning off cookies in the preferences settings in your web browser.
Storage Access Logging
We use Amazon S3 to store assets such as website files and Psiphon server discovery lists. We sometimes enable logging of downloads of these files. Analyzing these logs helps us to answer questions like "how many users are starting but not completing the download of the server discovery list?", "how is the downloaded data split between website assets and server discovery?", and "is an attacker making a denial-of-service attempt against our websites?"
S3 bucket access logs contain IP addresses, user agents, and timestamps. These logs are stored in S3 itself, so Amazon has access to these logs. (However, Amazon already serves the files, so they can already access this information.) Psiphon developers will download the logs, aggregate and analyze the data, and then delete the logs. Raw data will be kept only long enough to aggregate it and will not be shared with third parties.