Hello and good morning everyone.
I would like to tell you about my experience with AirVPN.
I subscribed to this service after reading wonders and not knowing that many review sites are owned by the same providers to give a superfluous and inflated impression of the true quality of the service they provide. It is worth mentioning that one of the activities that I carry out is journalism, and I am currently providing support to several students who have been victims of racism in the jobs corresponding to the department stores. For this reason, a research work was started that would help to position students in a real work environment and help them to be objective critics, at the same time that it would contribute to a rain of opinions that would later result in journalistic work. In my search I found the VPN provider AirVPN (it is worth mentioning that I use 3 other VPN service providers) and decided to give it a try.
AirVPN is proud to say and is promoted as a service provided by a team of activists and hacktivists in defense of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship. In my experience, it takes too much will, professionalism and ethics to put into practice all that they claim to be. It was very nice to be true and I ventured to hire their service first for 1 year, and then I decided for a special Halloween offer for 3 years. AirVPN promised to be everything that other providers are not, such as the support they have for the IPV6 protocol, but to do so we would have to put it to the test, right?
Once the service was contracted, the first thing I noticed were some problems when loading images in e-mails, on streaming sites and web pages in general. In addition to experiencing a kind of decrease in performance in general in normal navigation. It doesn’t always happen, but it definitely doesn’t happen with the other providers I’ve tried either. There were even some times when the service disconnected and left me completely vulnerable, this was what made me reconsider the quality of their service and everything they promise, which in my case did not work. For this reason I did not want to use the service for tasks that require a lot of privacy.
However, common sites such as: newsbin or Abercrombie cannot be accessed directly. And sites like: USPS can only be accessed indirectly (coming through a search engine). This seems too absurd to me, since it is the first VPN provider that is easily beaten by common web pages like that, since the other VPN providers have no problem landing on these pages. It was clear to me that AirVPN is not as robust as other providers and it does not have the foundations required to make this a service that people can trust. This was the first wake-up call I had. Not that these pages are important, but it is worth mentioning that it is highly illogical for a service that claims to be operated by activists and hacktivists to be easily defeated and discovered by ordinary web pages.
In the faculty, a kind of contest is being carried out that consists of carrying out journalistic work concerning the social environment and inequality in the last 10 years. One of the students decided to cover cases of discrimination in department stores. I made it clear to him that this was a very controversial issue, since large firms always try to hide and evade the real problem, creating fictitious situations that divert attention. Whereas any other company or individual in favor of discrimination or racism would do the same.
Noticing these series of issues with AirVPN, I decided to go to customer support to expose my problem and ask them what their opinion was about it. After exchanging a series of messages, the person who attended me began to show a lack of empathy and to show a certain evasion in his answers, at the moment he gave his personal opinion regarding my work, going off the subject and discrediting my job and experience arguing that journalistic work on a clothing page was irrelevant. When I noticed his generic, evasive responses and the interference in the business we carried out, I responded and asked him to please that what he considered irrelevant was not the role he should perform, and that he better take care of his affairs and take care of himself. focus on doing your job and letting others do theirs.
I no longer got an answer. In return I received an e-mail of the cancellation of the service and minutes later I received the full refund. The service may work very well for many other people, as long as they do not become targets of this class of people and the use they give to the service is very different from what we intended. They even banned my IP so I couldn’t access the site.
Far from admitting the mistake and how nosy the guy was being, he decided to terminate the service in an irrational and irresponsible way and then ban the IP. Is this the kind of VPN service provider one expects? Is this the kind of treatment one deserves? In my opinion it is clear that it is a service in charge of a person lacking in ethics and respect, who at the same time questions the reliability of the site as such, since regardless of what they promise, finally they did not even want to behave with probity.
They made me a favor for not accepting me as a customer, because this is exactly what makes a VPN bad: The lack of ethics and criteria.
From their webpage: “A VPN based on OpenVPN and operated by activists and hacktivists in defence of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship.” Yeah right…
My recommendation is to avoid AirVPN at all costs.
Thanks for your time.