The new version of F-Secure’s popular Freedome VPN puts Mac owners in control of their online privacy.
OS X delivers an intuitive user experience and pleasing 
aesthetic design to Mac users, and many MacBook owners can be seen enjoying their machines in public. But enjoying these devices in cafes and other places offering free Wi-Fi means Mac users are taking more risks with their privacy than their PC counterparts, making F-Secure’s new Freedome for Mac app an important tool to help OS X users control their online privacy.
A research survey* conducted by F-Secure indicates that Mac users take more risks with their online privacy than their PC counterparts, and take fewer precautions. Approximately 36% of Mac users surveyed use public Wi-Fi hotspots more than 3 times a week – that’s 13% more than PC users. The same study found that 32% of Mac users either didn’t know or didn’t use any kind of online protection, compared with only 10% of PC users. These gaps add up to a huge risk for large numbers of Mac users.
“PC and Mac users both have privacy needs, but what’s most interesting about our research is that Mac users tend to think about this less while taking more risks”, says F-Secure Executive Vice President, Consumer Security, Samu Konttinen. “For example, a Mac user might be more open to doing online banking using public Wi-Fi at a local cafe, but they’re less likely to realize that traffic from Macs is just as easy to intercept over public Wi-Fi as traffic from phones or Windows PCs. The things that MacBook users love to do are generally the same things that expose their data to snoops and thieves”.
Freedome for Mac addresses the needs of Mac users by wrapping a comprehensive set of protection tools into a single, easy-to-use app – essentially providing a premium online experience to Mac users. Freedome creates a secure VPN tunnel for Internet traffic, which protects users against criminals looking to intercept communications, companies trying to track online behavior, and malicious websites trying to infect computers. It also lets users choose from a selection of 17 virtual locations that can help them circumvent the geo-blocks used to restrict access to region locked content.
Konttinen sees both Freedome and Macs as tools that people can use to enjoy a premium online experience, making the two a perfect fit for one another. “People don’t use Macs because they have to – they use them because they want to. Freedome is similar in that it’s for people that really want to enjoy the freedom of being online. Using Freedome means you don’t have to accept geo-blocks that keep you from accessing your favorite content because you have the wrong IP address, and you don’t have to accept having your privacy invaded as the price for using free public Wi-Fi. Freedome helps you fight back”.
Freedome for Mac is now available for a free trial, and annual subscriptions can be purchased for a small fee. There are also multi-device subscriptions that can help people protect combinations of OS X, Windows PC, Android, iOS, and Amazon Fire devices, with a 50% off discount on 3-device subscriptions being offered until May 7.
*Source: The F-Secure Consumer Values Study 2014 consisted of online interviews of 4,800 age, gender and income-representative respondents from six countries, 800 respondents per country: US, UK, France, Germany, Brazil and the Philippines. The study was designed together with Informed Intuitions. Data was collected by Toluna Analytics in July 2014.
