ExpressVPN vs Windscribe

In 2017, Turkish authorities seized an ExpressVPN server investigating the assassination of Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov and found no usable logs (TorrentFreak, which carries a sponsorship notice for ExpressVPN — noted, not excluded, since the facts are externally checkable and ExpressVPN's own statement page has since returned HTTP 410 with no Wayback Machine snapshot).

In September 2021 the DOJ's Deferred Prosecution Agreement with Daniel Gericke, ExpressVPN's Chief Information Officer, over his prior 2016-2018 role in the UAE's 'Project Raven' hacking operation became public; the primary DPA document itself never names ExpressVPN (it covers only his earlier UAE employment) — the ExpressVPN link comes from ExpressVPN's own and press statements. ExpressVPN kept Gericke employed and published a public defense of that decision.

C12 is resettable_ad_id on the provider's own prose rather than on a store category. The privacy policy's marketing paragraph states that an Installation ID and an XV User ID are always collected and that advertising identifiers — IDFA or the Android Advertising ID — follow on explicit consent, all of it reaching AppsFlyer; the Play data-safety form independently declares Device or other IDs for advertising or marketing.

The consent gate and a mitigation nobody else here offers — AppsFlyer-bound traffic routed through a dedicated ExpressVPN IP pool so attribution cannot correlate by IP — are real and are recorded here, because the floor prices what can be held, not how well it is explained.

U07_protocols carries the whole picker: Lightway UDP and TCP as vendor_open, beside WireGuard, OpenVPN UDP/TCP and IKEv2. Lightway is ExpressVPN's own protocol and its source is published with independent review behind it (Cure53, 2021 and 2024), which is the distinction vendor_open exists for — proprietary prices the impossibility of telling whether a transport is weak, and here it can be told.

PPTP is retired on ExpressVPN apps by the provider's own protocol page, and L2TP and SSTP are explained there without being offered.

The transparency report. P05/P06/P08/P09 now rest on ExpressVPN's biannual transparency report (Jul–Dec 2025: 155 government/law-enforcement requests, 0 disclosures, 3 warrants listed separately) reached via the Trust Center — the earlier run missed both.

The canary, and the rest of the block. No ExpressVPN warrant canary could be found and no primary statement denies one, so P07 stays unknown. P02/P03=none_known rest on the transparency series and the privacy policy's litigation stance; P11=none_known on the policy's statement that all demands run through BVI courts. P04=withdrew_physical is the June 2022 India exit.

What is never published. Subscriber count (M08) and total server count (U03) are not published. Server hardware ownership (C08: owned vs leased) and app-level device identifiers (C12) could not be established from any page checked.

106 countries against a claim of 113. U02_server_countries reflects the 105 country-landing pages in ExpressVPN's own sitemap plus China (confirmed 'Available - Virtual Locations' on the live /vpn-server page but lacking a dedicated landing page) — 106 codes total, against the site's own marketing claim of '113 Countries'; the live server-location page is a very large per-protocol table that was not exhaustively parsed, so the gap between 106 and 113 is reported rather than resolved.

An audit finding between two categories. V11_audit_findings is recorded as session_metadata rather than none_linkable or aggregates_only: the 2025 KPMG report describes a structured per-connection record (country, ISP, date, protocol, data volume, a stable salted-hash pseudonym) that is more than a pure aggregate but lacks IP and precise time — a genuinely ambiguous case for this field's four middle categories.

Not checked this pass. Whether ExpressVPN's coverage exists outside affiliate sites (X08), its affiliate payout tier (X10), and whether owner-run review media flags the ownership tie (X11) were not checked in this pass.

P2P, looked for and absent. U12a_p2p_allowed stays unknown for a different reason than the rest: it was looked for and is not published. Neither sitemap (578 page and support URLs) nor the terms of service mentions P2P, BitTorrent or file sharing anywhere, while every other catalogued provider states its position in its own documents. A support article or a terms clause would close it; a review site saying it works would not.

Why retention is priced on the finding. Retention is therefore priced on what an auditor demonstrated was reachable rather than on what the policy declares, and the integrity channel carries the distance between the two. Read that as a two-year-old finding on one node, not as a current measurement: the scope was ca-023.windscribe.com alone, and a newer engagement covering more of the fleet is what would settle it.

The list that was never read. The offered country list was never read, so neither the usability country score nor the mandate intersection can be computed — Windscribe publishes a physical/virtual distinction, which makes C09b answerable here as soon as the list is. User scale is also unestablished, which leaves the exposure band resting on less than it should.

Where the three events now cite from. AIN.UA still carries the Ukrainian servers taken on 24 June 2021, and Windscribe's own blog the Greek case dismissed on 11 April 2025. The Dutch seizure and the seizure field itself now cite Windscribe's own no-logs page rather than the affiliate-paid press that first reported it: a company account of its own seizure is primary, not somebody else's account of one. The Ukrainian event is dated to the seizure itself, not the write-up.