After a year of further development, we are very pleased to announce SnowHaze 2.0. SnowHaze comes with a lot of cool new features. All of them help to further elevate the level of privacy and security and make SnowHaze still the only iOS browser that truly protects user data. The new features elevate SnowHaze to an unrivaled level on iOS.
The biggest change is the price of SnowHaze: Starting today, SnowHaze Private Browser is now available as a free application. So now that the financial argument is not valid anymore, go get friends and family, colleagues and strangers, and convince them to change their default browser. Now they literally have no more reasons to turn you down on this. Get everybody you know on the privacy train! The more we are, the better.
SnowHaze VPN
The biggest new feature is clearly the introduction of SnowHaze VPN. SnowHaze VPN is a full no-log VPN service. This means none of your metadata or traffic is monitored or stored by us. Your data just gets rerouted through our servers but everything stays private and secure and we don’t know and don’t want to know what you are doing. Because we don’t collect any information, nothing can be shared, leaked or revealed.
A trusted VPN service is a very important part of personal privacy and security and has been the biggest lack of SnowHaze so far. A VPN or Virtual Private Network is a way to extremely increase the personal privacy and security.
The basic idea of a VPN is that the whole traffic is rerouted through a VPN server. The VPN server then reroutes this traffic to its final destination. SnowHaze only uses self-hosted and dedicated VPN servers. The whole traffic between the VPN server and the user device is encrypted. The encryption protects the content from any sniffer.
The big gain in privacy stems from the fact that the recipient can only see the IP address of the VPN server but not the user’s true IP address. Although an IP address does not uniquely identify a user, it does reveal a lot of information. Therefore, hiding the IP address is important for staying private.
The big gain in security comes from the fact that all traffic from the user to the VPN server is encrypted with state of the art encryption. Often, data transmitted over public WLANs is unencrypted. Unencrypted connections are especially prone to man in the middle attacks. In these cases unencrypted connections are interfered and sensitive data, like bank data or login details can be stolen. Always using a VPN can circumvent this. When using a VPN the connection from your device to the server is always encrypted so nothing can be intercepted, and you stay completely private and secure. This is also important when considering the possible sniffing of your ISP. Your ISP can see all of your connections and all of its associated metadata. In case of an unencrypted connection, such as sending and receiving e-mails, the ISP can even read the content. By rerouting your connection through a VPN server you prevent your ISP from seeing your traffic and you can reduce the metadata generated to a minimum. The only connection your ISP will ever see is the connection to the VPN server. Since the traffic is encrypted, the ISP cannot see the true IP address of the destination, but only the IP address of the VPN server.
Now, there are many VPN services out there, why do we need another one?
Well there are a few things that really set SnowHaze VPN apart from competitors. First and most importantly, we have a very short and clear privacy policy. It basically says in very few and simple sentences, easy for everybody to verify, that we do not store, log or monitor any information on our VPN service. It is clear that still a lot of trust is needed to gain customers for a VPN service, but we are convinced that having a very intuitive and short privacy policy helps build up that trust.
Furthermore we really push the boundary of what type of information is needed to build a connection. To our knowledge, SnowHaze VPN is the first and only VPN that only needs the IP address to create and sustain a connection. We were not able to circumvent this because the IP address is needed for sending and receiving data packages. The IP address is partly identifying information, which could not be used by SnowHaze servers to uniquely identify and track users. As soon as the connection is lost, the IP address is deleted. As already mentioned, absolutely nothing is logged.
For the authorization process for setting up the connection between the user device and the VPN server, every user gets the same login credentials. It is therefore impossible for us to distinguish between users based on the login credentials. Unfortunately many of our competitors do track their users based on device number, login credentials and user IDs. VPN companies can be extremely powerful trackers, because the entire internet connection of the user passes the VPN servers. We therefore strongly believe that only no log services can provide sufficient security. Since SnowHaze VPN cannot even distinguish its users, this provides more and unprecedented protection of the personal data.
All the billing is handled by apple. We do not know who bought subscriptions, we cannot distinguish our subscribers based on any login credentials, and we only know how many people have bought a subscription. This means people have the maximum possible amount of privacy towards us. Unfortunately, we still do not get around saving the IP address temporarily to create and sustain the connection. Once the connection is over the IP address is deleted from our VPN server.
Search engine
We are furthermore very proud to announce the SnowHaze search engine. It is a search engine, run and hosted by SnowHaze, based on the open source search engine Gigablast. The search engine does not track or monitor any of its users. Search engines are a vulnerable part to data leaks in your online behavior. The reason for this is the often large amount of data revealed when using a search engine. It is therefore best to use a search engine that has a good privacy policy (and reasonably good results, too). We chose StartPage as the default search engine in SnowHaze. StartPage does have a good privacy policy and thanks to search results provided by Google, the results are satisfying. However, there is a downside to this setup. While Google does not know your identity, when you are using StartPage, it will still see what you are searching. In certain cases this can still reveal a lot about you and even deanonymize you totally.
If your search query contains identifying information, it is a good idea to use a search engine that does not share your information with anybody. This is where SnowHaze search engine comes into play. While clearly not one of the best search engines with respect to the results – we certainly have one of the best privacy policies around – we do not log/share/monitor anything, period.
More and better tracking protection
The number of tracking and sites detected has highly increased. The number of private sites recognized has even increased tenfold. The protection against tracking scripts is highly important and an extensive list of tracking sites is essential for any private browser.
Phishing protection
SnowHaze introduces a new two layer phishing protection. The first level consists of warnings based on the extensive lists of Phishtank.org and Google Safebrowsing. Both lists are stored locally on your device and no connections are necessary to generate the advisories. Optionally, the lists can be updated regularly over SnowHaze servers. Still, no connections will be established to Google or Phishtank.org.
The second layer of the phishing protection is the possibility to mark sites as trusted. The user can use this to mark sites, where the user needs to log in or to provide other personal information. Whenever the user visits this site again, the user can easily check with a symbol in the URL bar, whether this site has been trusted. This way the user knows if the correct site has loaded.
SnowHaze Premium
In order to finance the further development of SnowHaze and to cover the cost of the VPN servers, a few SnowHaze features are only available to subscribed customers. These include the VPN service, the search engine and daily list updates of the ad, tracking, private and phishing sites lists.
Related Posts
Download SnowHaze
