Anuson Limited has been in the VPN business for 6 years now, and is mainly known for its VPN service 12VPN. The company differentiates itself from other providers by not focusing on users who are looking to unblock Netflix, Hulu or download torrents. Instead, 12VPN wants to be among the leading solutions in protecting your personal privacy and information, and breaking through censorship. This commitment shows in the fact that the 12VPN team is constantly working on making sure its secure VPN service can continue to work, no matter which censorship restrictions would suddenly become active.
Can you introduce yourself and 12VPN?
I’m Jenny Yang, in charge of customer support at Anuson Limited.
Which logs do you keep of your users?
We record login and logout data and keep this for 30 days. We also record VPN related errors and keep this for 24-48 hours for troubleshooting purposes. We don’t advertise our minimal logging because we believe it provides a false sense of anonymity. With systems like Prism in place it’s trivial for government agencies to correlate VPN connections to regular connections that exit a VPN.
What made you choose Viscosity as your main VPN client solution?
Most of our users find Viscosity to be more user-friendly than Tunnelblick on OS/X of OpenVPN-GUI on Windows. We also find that the cost savings it provides our customer support department outweigh the costs of the Viscosity software. It’s a good fit for 12VPN and its customers.
Are you planning on developing your own VPN software?
We’re not planning to develop our own client software. It will be hard to come up with something significantly better than what Viscosity or other 3rd-parties provide and we’re not looking to create a vendor lock-in. Note that we provide users with a Viscosity license they own and are able to use even after their cancel our service.
Is it fair to say that you are mainly specializing in offering VPN solutions for people residing in China?
The majority of our clients are in indeed China. We don’t focus on China per se, but we purposely ignore the “watch Hulu” or “use torrents” markets. That leaves us mostly with users in need of security or anti-censorship services.
Can you tell us more about VPN.tv?
VPN.tv was a Google Chrome extension which connects to proxy servers and allows a transparent experience for everything running inside the Chrome web browser, including applications running on a Chromebook. What separates VPN.tv from other proxy plugins is that VPN.tv’s connection to the proxy servers is secured by SSL, whereas most proxy plugins don’t do or support this. At the moment only Chrome supports these SSL secured proxy connections.
Why should people use 12VPN and not a competing service?
In the 4 years that we’ve been operating, which really isn’t that long, we’ve seen many VPN providers appear and disappear. Disappear either completely or shutting down “difficult” markets like China and other countries with heavy censorship. We’re here to get and keep people connected, provide the best possible customer support and don’t walk away with your money when times get tough.
We read on your Twitter that there were rumors about Visa and MasterCard interfering with VPN services. What was the fuzz about?
I don’t think we’ll ever know what that was really about. If any part of the story was true it probably applied to iPredator only.
What is the 12VPN team currently working on?
We’re currently working on improving our backup VPN service. Should censorship become excessive and block the VPN types we currently have available, we’ll be able to roll out an entirely new service in just a few days.
Big thank you to Jenny and the rest of the 12VPN team for doing this questionnaire with us!
Daniel C.
Sander D.
I’m amazed to hear a few negative comments here about 12vpn’s customer service. Neil has always been extremely patient, detailed and upfront with me when I need assistance or am experiencing issues with my connections, which happens quite infrequently and mostly when moving to another region with a different Internet provider. I have been using them for years and have been quite satisfied.
Their customer service is very poor. The one named Neil dare say “Please do not register again” How arrogant they are. I still have that impolite and rude email if anyone want to see it. I doubt some positvie comment below is marketing stuff
I’ve had quite the opposite experience. I’ve had 12 VPN for a long time, and it has never let me down. In addition, I’ve had interactions with BOTH Jenny AND Neil, and found them to be patient and informative. I’m not doubting your experience, but just wanted you to know that as an informed long-term customer, I couldn’t be happier.
I totally agree with Nicole. I have similar experience. Neil Smith is very impatient for customers. What’s worse it that he is controlling this Company. DO NOT USE 12VPN…
I am reading the interview with Jenny Yang. It is very interesting but I have my doubts about this company. I am a consumer and I felt let down by 12VPN. They ended the conversation very quickly. I was asking questions about their VPN and I was dealing with Neil Smith and because I did not answer him in a timely manner or within “minutes”Bang!!! the conversation was over. I was shocked because at times, I need to consider the PRO and the CON of a company and if they are suited for my needs. I read a lot of review therefore I need to be sure that I make the right decision but I guess they do not allow this with consumer. This is not good.