Two days ago, I purchased a years subscription to Norton Wifi Privacy, with the current special offer of €39.99 for one year. I am about to request a refund and thought I’d use the forum to share some feedback in hopes that it might be useful to Norton product management and engineering.
I appreciate that this is a v1 implementation of the WiFi privacy product and that improvements I’m sure will be coming as the product’s roadmap gets developed and rolled out. However, VPN providers is also a mature and competitive landscape and Norton WiFi privacy isn’t the only source of this capability — so it also needs to be judged within that market context.
My primary scenarios
I wish to protect myself when,
- Using my Mac on public wifi provided by local train transport company on daily commute.
- Using my Mac’s ethernet connection in a co-working office space, where there are many opportunities by building network engineers to sniff traffic.
What I liked
When purchasing a VPN subscription, you are in essence purchasing trust — its the most important aspect of the product. Norton claims within marketing that it “Encrypt your data with a no-log virtual private network that doesn’t track or store your activity”.
I trust Norton and I’ve no reason to not believe that statement and trust that they will work hard to deliver on that commitment. I do not feel the same way about many VPN products, that at their core seem more orientated about breaking through region locks on Netflix and encouraging piracy than Norton which – correctly, in my view – promotes the security and privacy elements of VPNs.
60-day money-back guarantee.
What I disliked
The Mac app does not react and respond in a “native manner” and feels very uncomfortable on the platform. Details matter and the VPN client lacks them.
- The dropdown window does not position itself correctly as other toolbar/status bar apps do.
Correct positioning (1password app):
Norton Wifi Privacy positioning:
- Because of the above, when a app is in full screen, you can't see the VPN client when status bar item is clicked on -- again, I suspect because of its "non-native" origins.
- The VPN client is a status bar app, but it also loads a app icon on the toolbar -- this is because within XCode Info.plist there is a missing entry: "Application is agent (UIElement)" should be added and set to "YES". Again, a little detail that really matters to a user.
- The toggle switch is very unresponsive — you don’t know if you’ve clicked it or not, as its status is associated with the VPN connection status, rather then user input.
- It consumes much too much CPU% when idle and not active.
- And therefore, its often way too high in the energy usage, again when VPN connection is not active.
- I would expect VPNs to decrease network throughput, however, when on a fast 1Gbps network, the Norton VPN massively reduces network speeds - much more than I would have expected.
Ethernet, without VPN active:
Ethernet, with VPN active:
- If there was more technical information on the VPN network - then perhaps I could consider using other, more native VPN clients — but Norton doesn’t make the info available, so the limitation of the client are impacting.
I’ll keep an eye on the product’s development and maybe try again in a year, but for now, I’m going to cancel my account and request a refund.