For years, virtual private network providers have marketed themselves primarily as tools for encrypting internet traffic and masking IP addresses. But a growing cohort of privacy-focused companies is now pushing into territory that traditional VPNs were never designed to address: the sprawling, largely invisible ecosystem of in-app tracking that follows users across their digital lives. PrivadoVPN, the Swiss-based privacy firm, is the latest to make a significant move in this direction, launching a feature called PhantomMode on its iOS app that aims to block apps from harvesting user data even when the VPN tunnel itself isn’t active.
The feature, which rolled out to iOS users in mid-2025, represents a meaningful expansion of what consumers can expect from a VPN subscription. Rather than simply routing traffic through encrypted servers, PhantomMode operates at the device level to intercept and neutralize tracking requests made by apps installed on a user’s iPhone or iPad. According to reporting by TechRadar, the tool blocks ad trackers, data brokers, and other third-party surveillance mechanisms that apps routinely embed in their code — often without meaningful disclosure to users.
How PhantomMode Works Under the Hood
PhantomMode leverages DNS-level filtering to intercept tracking requests before they leave the device. When an app attempts to contact a known tracker domain — whether it’s an advertising network, an analytics service, or a data broker’s collection endpoint — the feature silently blocks the request. This approach is architecturally similar to what browser-based ad blockers do on the web, but applied at the operating system level to cover all app activity. PrivadoVPN has described the feature as working in concert with its existing VPN service, but critically, it can also function independently, meaning users benefit from tracker blocking even when they aren’t connected to a VPN server.
This distinction matters. Most consumers assume that activating a VPN protects them comprehensively, but the reality is far more nuanced. A VPN encrypts data in transit and hides a user’s IP address from the websites and services they visit. It does nothing, however, to prevent an app running locally on a device from collecting device identifiers, behavioral data, location information, or other telemetry and transmitting it to third parties. PhantomMode is designed to fill precisely this gap, targeting the data collection that happens inside apps before it ever reaches the network layer.
Apple’s Privacy Push Created an Opening — and a Limitation
Apple has, of course, made privacy a central pillar of its brand identity. The company’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, introduced with iOS 14.5 in 2021, requires apps to ask users for permission before tracking them across other companies’ apps and websites. The feature was widely praised by privacy advocates and widely loathed by the digital advertising industry — Facebook parent Meta famously warned that ATT would cost it $10 billion in annual revenue. But ATT has significant limitations. It governs cross-app tracking using Apple’s IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers), but it does not prevent apps from collecting extensive data within their own environments. Nor does it block the use of probabilistic fingerprinting techniques, which have proliferated as deterministic identifiers have become harder to access.
Research published by security firms and academic institutions in recent years has documented the extent to which apps continue to harvest data despite ATT. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Oxford found that the number of tracking libraries present in popular iOS apps had not meaningfully declined after ATT’s introduction. Apps simply shifted their data collection strategies, relying more heavily on first-party data accumulation and server-side tracking that falls outside ATT’s enforcement scope. PrivadoVPN’s PhantomMode appears to be a direct response to these residual vulnerabilities, offering a layer of protection that Apple’s own tools do not fully provide.
The VPN Industry’s Broader Pivot Toward Anti-Tracking
PrivadoVPN is not operating in isolation. The broader VPN industry has been steadily expanding its product offerings beyond simple tunneling services. NordVPN’s Threat Protection feature, Surfshark’s CleanWeb, and ExpressVPN’s Threat Manager all incorporate some form of tracker blocking or malicious domain filtering. What distinguishes PhantomMode, according to TechRadar, is its specific focus on app-level surveillance on iOS and its ability to function as a standalone privacy layer rather than merely an add-on to VPN connectivity.
This evolution reflects a commercial reality: the VPN market has become intensely competitive, with dozens of providers offering functionally similar encryption and server networks. Price wars have compressed margins, and consumer awareness of VPN limitations has grown. To differentiate, providers increasingly need to offer tangible privacy benefits that go beyond IP masking. Anti-tracking features represent a logical extension, particularly as public concern about data harvesting continues to intensify. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 81% of Americans felt they had little or no control over the data companies collect about them, a figure that has remained stubbornly high for years.
The Technical and Regulatory Context
The timing of PhantomMode’s launch also coincides with growing regulatory scrutiny of app-based data collection. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act, which took full effect in March 2024, imposes new obligations on large platform operators regarding data use and interoperability. In the United States, a patchwork of state-level privacy laws — led by the California Consumer Privacy Act and its successor, the CPRA — has created new compliance burdens for app developers and the data brokers they work with. But enforcement has been uneven, and the sheer volume of tracking activity means that regulatory action alone is unlikely to provide comprehensive protection for individual users.
This is where tools like PhantomMode find their market rationale. They offer a self-help mechanism for privacy-conscious consumers who are unwilling to wait for regulators to catch up with the pace of data collection innovation. The DNS-filtering approach is technically elegant because it operates at a chokepoint that all apps must pass through to communicate with external servers. By maintaining and updating a blocklist of known tracker domains, PrivadoVPN can adapt to new tracking infrastructure as it emerges, though the effectiveness of any such system depends heavily on the quality and currency of its blocklists.
Limitations and the Trust Question
No privacy tool is without trade-offs, and PhantomMode is no exception. DNS-level blocking can occasionally interfere with legitimate app functionality if a blocked domain serves both tracking and operational purposes. Users may experience broken features in some apps, a friction point that has historically limited the adoption of aggressive ad-blocking tools. PrivadoVPN will need to carefully calibrate its blocklists to minimize false positives while maintaining robust coverage of tracking domains.
There is also the perennial question of trust that applies to all VPN providers. By routing DNS queries through its own filtering infrastructure, PrivadoVPN gains visibility into the domain requests made by a user’s device. The company is headquartered in Switzerland, which has strong privacy laws and is outside the jurisdiction of the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Fourteen Eyes intelligence-sharing alliances. PrivadoVPN claims to operate under a strict no-logs policy. But users must ultimately take the company at its word, absent the kind of independent, comprehensive auditing that remains rare in the VPN industry. Some providers, including NordVPN and Surfshark, have undergone third-party audits of their no-logs claims; whether PrivadoVPN will submit PhantomMode’s data handling practices to similar scrutiny remains to be seen.
What This Means for the Privacy-Conscious Consumer
For iOS users who are serious about limiting the data that apps collect about them, PhantomMode represents a meaningful addition to the privacy toolkit. It does not replace the need for thoughtful app permission management, nor does it eliminate all forms of tracking — server-side analytics, for instance, are beyond the reach of any client-side blocking tool. But it addresses a genuine blind spot in the current privacy infrastructure available to iPhone users, one that Apple’s own features have not fully closed.
The broader trajectory is clear: consumers are increasingly expecting their privacy tools to do more than encrypt a connection. They want comprehensive protection against the full spectrum of data collection practices that modern apps employ. PrivadoVPN’s PhantomMode is a bet that the market is ready for VPN providers to step into that role — and that users will pay for the privilege of disappearing from the trackers that follow them through every tap and swipe on their screens.