Winston PrivacyReviews of winstonprivacy.com

Teri @ Winston asked me to review the Winston product. The Winston filtering device / privately obfuscated traffic network is a product who's time has come. I was using a Raspberry Pi running pihole on my local network and it was surprisingly effective, albeit with a lot of holes (pun) in its defenses. The Winston product is quite a bit easier and far more effective to deploy and use. As with any network traffic filtering device, it takes a little exposure (pun) in order to get it set to your preferences; in my case, the more filtering, the better. I did have some small issues with Alexa-centric devices making it through, but the Support folks were responsive and effective, producing a solution in short order. A five-star rating would have been in order had the Support website been a little less fiddly to work with [for me anyway.] Spending a lot of time on the 'InterWeb' without the protection Winston Privacy provides is a little like the emperor's new clothes; feeling a stiff breeze are we? (O:

I have had Winston now for 24 hours with cloaking (privacy mesh network) enabled the entire time. I can say that this portion does not work, local restaurant check they demo in their instructional video shows my location when I duplicate it exactly and any ip or geolocation check shows me exactly where I live. I opened a ticket and my explanation was "some sites are cloaked and some not". I feel unsatisfied with results of what was promised, I am hesitant to recommend this product. Also my agent I chatted with says "well mine works". I may send mine back and return to vpn within 30 days if not able to achieve resolution to this small but very important feature (to me any way). I have added two stars to my review for the way customer support has responded to my review even though I still have not been able to successfully replicate cloaking as shown in demo or by geolocation/ip search. Mine still shows my exact location down to the street. Teri has informed me that the company is contemplating adding a manual feature to bypass the Winston cloaking sites it rates 4/5 only. I still am unhappy with the product in it's current state but the support team and CEO seem serious about feedback and that earned them two additional stars. Thanks Teri for the email and please make it know that cloaking is a very important feature to me and I would consider this to be a make or break when it comes to my using this product.

I have had the product up and running now for a week. I spent a lot of time asking them numerous questions before I bought and had received answers promptly and to my satisfaction. Because of my wireless Mesh configuration I was uncertain it would work as I had serious issues with another product. Setup was easy and I was up and running within 20 minutes of opening the box! Also, they have superb follow-up and product support...

10/10 recommend. This device does exactly what it says it will do, while causing minimal interference to the use of everyday streaming services, corporate login etc. Incredibly easy to setup and their support team was quick to answer my questions about advanced features. Also, it looks fantastic!

I'm very happy with Winston. I've noticed that websites load faster without all those ads. I had a problem with the mobile protection, but as it turned out, the problem was with my modem (not the Winston). Tech Support was patient and accommodating until it was figured out. I'm completely happy with Winston and I'd recommend it to everyone!

Outside of a couple of minor challenges on the set up that were quickly handled by the Winston support team I have been loving this ever since. Would highly recommend installing the browser extension that allows you to adjust the duration of no blocking on a particular site from 1 hour to forever so if you have websites that you use a lot and don't want them interrupted it's easy to make exceptions. Also my wife has a few websites that she uses for work everyday and it was as easy as having her send me the links and I created permanent exceptions in about 1 minute. Very cool tech!

I love winston It is very easy to use I love the features of it and the ios app I would love to see more features added

I received my Winston about 2 weeks ago and it installed without any difficulty. I have a Xfinity XB7 combo modem/router and was a bit leery that a single input from the Xfinity router to Winston would allow the Winston to stop any traffic, but it sure does. I started out in the High Compatibility mode where it lets a lot of traffic through. As I got a bit more confident in a day or so with what it was doing I moved it to Aggressive mode. I did have to add a few modules to allow some services to work correctly. The biggest was Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Cloud Services. That is a shame as Microsoft is the biggest offender - of 7,638 blocked tracking domains (just today!) 2547 of them are Microsoft domains. I plan on looking at this a little closer and see what I can block without impacting how I use Office. The second biggest blocked domains belonged to, no surprise, Facebook. They have to have a lot of traffic to know I had searched for left-handed back scratchers somewhere else. Other modules I have added include Arlo, Amazon Echo, Hue Lights, and Ring. Other than Amazon, the others don't seem to be sucking up a lot of data from me. Winston does tell you both the number of connections blocked and how much data the allowed ones are consuming. I've probably done more with Winston than many will need to do but nowhere near what I think I could do with it. I highly recommend this product.