A maze called VPN logging policies

Osama Tahir — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 06:10:26 +0000

It would be an understatement to say that online privacy is a big issue today. Facebook-Cambridge Analytica, NHS handing over patient data to machine learning companies, and the list goes on and on.

It's almost as if our private information is a free giveaway that companies obtain from us, often under false pretense, only to be sold to third-party companies to learn about us and throw personalized ads our way. Or for more nefarious purposes like influencing voter behavior in general elections.

In these state of affairs, it is natural to search for measures for improving your online privacy. VPN services are on the frontline of privacy protection tools and their usage is getting more popular everywhere in the world.

The unfortunate conundrum here is that VPNs can often be complicit in keeping logs of your data and even sell them to third-parties. The very tool that people rely on to stay safe on the web can actually be the culprit violating their privacy.

Every VPN service provider has a privacy policy page where they must specify if they keep logs. But the question that should immediately arise is: what kind of logs does a VPN keep?

This is where things get a little complicated. Most providers advertise themselves as being a "no-logs" service. But if you dig deep and read their privacy statements, you realize that they do keep logs, which may or may not be that big of a deal.

It is impossible for any software tool like a VPN to work without keeping some user information such as payment IDs, transaction history, and in many cases IP addresses of users.

What needs to be remembered is that not all data is equally hurtful to your privacy. Information about your bandwidth usage alone can't reveal all that much. But if that information is combined with other pieces of data such as your DNS, IP address, traffic, and connection timestamps, that's probably a situation that you need to worry about.

So, how can you decide if a VPN isn't keeping any more tabs on you than it absolutely needs to operate business?

VPNs should not keep logs about your timestamps, IP address, DNS, and traffic. Period. Some providers keep none of these logs while others may retain some of this information.

To see logging details of popular VPN services at a glance, I created a VPN comparison spreadsheet.

You can find this sheet here: https://www.vpnranks.com/vpn-comparison/

Further reading
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/23/17151916/facebook-cambridge-analytica-trump-diagram

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-nhs-health-app-deepmind-artificial-intelligence-ai-privacy-streams-app-a8633316.html

https://hackernoon.com/what-vpn-services-arent-telling-you-about-data-logging-4ce15e4c90f0

DEV Community: Osama Tahir

A maze called VPN logging policies