With our findings we compiled a report of VPN providers that due to their setup were unable to link their outbound IP addresses with user accounts. Ever since we have received countless emails demanding an update.

Update: New 2014 update is out.

It’s taken a long time but today we bring the first installment in a series of posts highlighting VPN services that take privacy seriously. Our first article focuses on anonymity and a later installment will highlight file-sharing aspects and possible limitations.

We tried to ask direct questions that left VPN service providers with little room for maneuver. Providers who didn’t answer our questions directly, didn’t answer at all, or completely failed by logging everything, were simply left out. Sadly this meant that quite a few were disregarded.

This year we also asked more questions, which are as follows:

1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you or a 3rd party to match an IP-address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold?

2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?

3. In the event you receive a DMCA takedown notice or European equivalent, how are these handled?

4. Which payment systems do you operate and how are these linked to individual user accounts?

The list of VPN providers is a tiny sample of the thousands out there today and is not comprehensive by any means. VPN Providers not covered this time around will be added during the coming weeks. All responses listed below are in the words of VPN services themselves and the order of the list does not carry any meaning.

Private Internet Access

1. We absolutely do not maintain any VPN logs of any kind. We utilize shared IP addresses rather than dynamic or static IPs, so it is not possible to match a user to an external IP. These are some of the many solutions we have implemented to enable the strongest levels of anonymity amongst VPN services.

2. Our company currently operates out of the United States with gigabit gateways in the US, Canada, Germany, France, UK, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Romania. We chose the US, since it is one of the few countries without a mandatory data retention law. We will not share any information with third parties without a valid court order. With that said, it is impossible to match a user to any activity on our system since we utilize shared IPs and maintain absolutely no logs.

3. We are in compliance with DMCA as all companies, world-wide, must be. We have proprietary technology and an experienced legal team which allows us to comply without any risk to our users.

4. We accept many payment methods directly, including PayPal, CC, Google, Amazon, Bitcoin, Liberty Reserve, OKPay, and CashU. Further, we would like to encourage our users to use an anonymous e-mail and pay with Bitcoins to ensure even higher levels of anonymity should it be required. We only store the minimal information required to provide customers refunds.

Private Internet Access website

BTGuard

1. We do not keep any logs whatsoever.

2. The jurisdiction is Canada. Since we do not have log files, we have no information to share. We do not communicate with any third parties. The only event we would even communicate with a third-party is if we received a court order. We would then be forced to notify them we have no information. This has not happened yet.

3. We do not have any open incoming ports, so it’s not possible for us to “takedown” any broadcasting content.

4. At the moment we only accept Paypal and Bitcoin. We have plans to accept alternative credit card processing in the near future.

BTguard website (with discounts)

Torguard

1. TorGuard doesn’t store IP’s or time stamps on our VPN/proxy servers, not even for a second. It’s impossible to match what is not there. Since some people tend to misbehave when using a VPN , this raises the obvious question: how do we maintain a fast, abuse-free network? If even our network engineer can’t back track the abuser by IP, then how do we stop it?

Through packet level filtering at the firewall it’s possible to apply rules to an entire shared server, blocking the abuse immediately. For example, let’s say someone decides to use TorGuard to unlawfully promote their Ugg boots business (spam). In order for us to block this one individual, we simply implement new firewall rules, effectively blocking the abused protocol for everyone on that VPN server. Since there are no user logs to go by, we handle abuse per server, not per user.

2. TorGuard recently went through some corporate restructuring and has now moved its parent company to Nevis, West Indies. Our company abides by all International laws and data regulations imposed within our legal jurisdiction. We don’t share any information with anyone regarding our network or its users and won’t even consider communicating with a 3rd party unless they’ve first obtained adequate representation within our legal jurisdiction. Only in the event of an official court ordered ruling would we be forced to hand over blank hard drives. There’s nothing to hand over but an operating system.

3. TorGuard complies immediately (24 hours or less) with all DMCA takedown notices. Since it’s impossible for us to locate which user on the server is actually responsible for the violation, we block the infringing protocol in its entirety, whatever it may be – Kazaa, HTTP, Jabber, Citrix, Bittorrent, FTP, Gnucleus, eDonkey2000, etc. This ensures the content in violation is immediately removed from that server and no longer active on our network.

4. We accept all forms of credit card, Visa, Amex, Mastercard, Discover, PayPal , Google Checkout and Bitcoins. We also accept anonymous payments through our pre-paid PIN system. These pre-paid service PIN numbers can be purchased from one of our participating online resellers and redeemed during checkout on our website.

Our client billing area and VPN/Proxy user auth servers are two completely separate systems. This is to ensure the privacy and securities of our customer’s accounts are upheld at all times. While the customer’s chosen payment method will be linked to the client billing area login, this information is kept completely separate from their VPN/Proxy network. In this way, it’s virtually impossible to “connect the dots” of a paying customer with that of someone who is using the servers. This can become a pain for clients as they are required to remember two sets of logins/passwords, but trust us – it’s in the best interest of security.

TorGuard website

(Use the promo / coupon code TorrentFreak to get a 20% discount at Torguard.

TorrentPrivacy

1. We don’t store any logs, it’s impossible to track users’ activity through our VPN.

2. Our company is based on Seychelles. We do not disclose any information to 3rd parties and this can be done only in case of a certain lawsuit filed against our company.

3. If we receive a notice about DMCA infringement, our team of lawyers solves it immediately without any blocking of servers or protocols. We don’t store any content on our servers, users are anonymous, so, there are no problems with it. We promise our customers that they will not have problems with the DMCA.

4. PayPal and CommerceGate.

TorrentPrivacy website

IPVanish

1. IPVanish has a no-log policy. We keep no traffic logs.

2. IPVanish is headquartered in the US and thus operates under US law.

3. We do not host content of any kind and have nothing to take down or remove.

4. We currently accept all major credit cards, PayPal and UltimatePay (which includes 85 different payment methods from 190 countries). UltimatePay also provides many anonymous cash payment options like Western Union, Alipay, Skrill and PaySafeCard.

IPVanish website

Privacy.io

1) We do not keep any logs on our servers. Neither us nor 3rd parties are able to match IPs to a username.

2) Privacy IO is an Australian Registered business. Under no circumstances will we provide any 3rd party information about our users. We are unable to comply with DMCA or equivalent as we have no access or power to do anything about it. As we keep no logs we can not link it to a user to apply said request. If the law attempts to make us do such things, we will move our business to a location where that can not occur, and if that fails we will close up shop before we provide any information.

3) See answer to question 2

4) At present we only accept PayPal and CC (processed by PayPal), but we are looking into alternative types of payments. We go out of our way to make sure that PayPal transactions are not linked to the users, we generate a unique key per transaction to verify payment for the account is made, and then nuke that unique key.

Privacy.io website

VikingVPN

1) We do not log any user activity at all. We don’t know what IP addresses our own users connect from. We have a shared IP address for our users, further increasing their anonymity We also generate false traffic.

2) We currently operate out of the United States. The United States does not have any mandatory data retention laws, which allows us not to log anything. If we receive a valid warrant, we will turn over all required records, that we have available; we don’t have any records available, because we don’t log anything.

3) DMCA notices have some legal requirements that basically make them not apply to us. We don’t host any content at all, we only provide bandwidth. Also, a DMCA notice requires the notifier to positively identify an infringing individual – which is impossible given our security model. Basically, it’s impossible to send us a valid DMCA notice.

4) We’re just getting started, so we’re currently simply taking credit cards. Accepting bitcoin is a near term goal for us. We’d also like to start accepting really exotic forms of payment like cash.

VikingVPN website

Anonine

1. We store a users E-mail and username, that´s it. This means that we do not store, or have access to, any traffic logs of any kind. By traffic logs we mean, any kind of data that has the potential to, directly or indirectly, match a users original ip or identity with one of our IPs.

2. It is important to remember that we do not store any traffic logs, and therefore it would be physically impossible for us to hand something like that over to a 3rd party. This, next to the encryption, is the core of the entire anonymity aspect of the service. This is possible by the fact that we operate under Swedish jurisdiction and Swedish law.

3. Our no logging policy has never really caused us any trouble since we never have received any official requests to hand over any traffic logs.

4. We accept credit card payments through Paypal and Payson. For Swedish users we also accept payments through sms and phone. We do not store data from these services. However, each of these services store various types and amounts of data related to the payment, and the payment only, which we do have access to. This is what allows us to perform refunds, or to provide adequate support services etc.

Anonine website

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

There are dozens of VPN providers, many of which carry marketing on their web pages which suggests that the anonymity of their subscribers is a top priority. But is it really? Do their privacy policies stand up to scrutiny? We decided to find out.

Over the past two weeks TorrentFreak contacted some of the leading, most-advertised, and most talked about VPN providers in the file-sharing and anonymity space. Rather than trying to decipher what their often-confusing marketing lingo really means, we asked them two direct questions instead:

1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold?

2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?

This article does not attempt to consider the actual quality of service offered by any listed provider, nor does it consider whether any service is good value for money. All we are interested in is this: Do they live up to claims that they provide a 100% anonymous service? So here we go, VPN providers in the file-sharing space first.

P2P Supporting VPN providers

BTguard

Response to Q1: “It’s technically unfeasible for us to maintain log files with the amount of connections we route,” BTguard explain. “We estimate the capacity needed to store log files would be 4TB per day.”

Response to Q2: “The jurisdiction is Canada. Since we do not have log files, we have no information to share. We do not communicate with any third parties. The only event we would even communicate with a third party is if we received a court order. We would then be forced to notify them we have no information. This has not happened yet.”

BTguard website (with discounts)

Private Internet Access

Response to Q1: “We absolutely do not maintain any VPN logs of any kind. We utilize shared IP addresses rather than dynamic or static IPs, so it is not possible to match a user to an external IP. These are some of the many solutions we have implemented to enable the strongest levels of anonymity amongst VPN services. Further, we would like to encourage our users to use an anonymous e-mail and pay with Bitcoins to ensure even higher levels of anonymity should it be required. Our core verticals are privacy, quality of service, and prompt customer support.”

Response to Q2: “Our company currently operates out of the United States with gigabit gateways in the US, Canada, UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. We chose the US, since it is one of the only countries without a mandatory data retention law. We will not share any information with third parties without a valid court order. With that said, it is impossible to match a user to any activity on our system since we utilize shared IPs and maintain absolutely no logs.”

Private Internet Access website

TorGuard

Response to Q1: “Our sever connection logs are purged on a daily basis since we don’t maintain hard drive’s big enough to store all this data. TorGuard’s torrent proxy and VPN connection logs do not associate an IP with each request as there are hundreds of users sharing the same connection at any given time. Since there are no logs kept or IP’s recorded, it is not possible to identify exactly who has used the connection.”

Response to Q2: “Our parent company is based in Panama, with secure servers in Netherlands, Romania, Ukraine and Panama. We do not share any of our user’s information with third parties, period. Only in the event of an official court order would we be forced to communicate with a third party. This scenario has never occurred, but if it were to, we would be forced to explain in more technical terms how we don’t maintain usage logs.”

TorGuard website

Update: use the promo / coupon code TorrentFreak to get a 20% discount at Torguard.

IPVanish

Response to Q1: We in no way record or store any user’s activity while connected to IPVanish. The only information we collect from a VPN session is: Timestamp (date and server time) of the connection to us, duration of the connection, IP address used for the connection and bytes transferred. Logs are also regularly cycled. Additionally, IPVanish users are given dynamic and SHARED IP addresses on the same servers—making it impossible for us to single out anyone for anything.

Response to Q2: ” We operate out of the US and, like all companies and citizens, must comply with local law. As detailed earlier, we have generic connection logs, but that information is not sufficient for identifying individual users. We take privacy and reliable extremely seriously and will also never share, rent or lease any information to any 3rd party.”

IPVanish website

TorrentPrivacy

Response to Q1: “We have connection logs, but we don’t store IP addresses there. These logs are kept for 7 days. Though it’s impossible to determine who exactly have used the service.”

Response to Q2: “We have servers in Netherlands, Sweden and USA while our company is based on Seychelles. We do not disclose any information to 3rd parties and this can be done only in case of a certain lawsuit filed against our company.”

TorrentPrivacy website

ItsHidden

Response to Q1: “No logs, they are not kept. Even system logs that do not directly link to users are rotated on an hourly basis.”

Response to Q2: “The company has recently been sold and falls under the Jurisdiction of the Seychelles. As such there is no requirement [to log] within that jurisdiction.”

ItsHidden website

Ipredator

Response to Q1: “We don’t store the IP at all actually. It’s in temporary use for the session you have when you’re connected but that’s it. We’ve had very few issues with not having logs, but not keeping them makes it safer even for us since we can’t accidentally give out information about anyone.”

Response to Q2: “We fall – mostly – under Swedish jurisdiction when it comes to the service. When it comes to organisational stuff (who keeps the data, who owns the service, who owns the server, who owns the network etc etc) it’s very mixed, intentionally. This is to make it hard and/or impossible to legally bully us around if that would be the case.”

“We can’t be easily shut down, and we can’t be pressured by courts to implement stuff we would oppose. For end-users this is not affecting them in a negative way at all, only the opposite.”

Ipredator website

Faceless

Response to Q1: “We do not log any IP addresses and no information about what data is accessed by our users, so we have no information that could be interesting to third-parties.”

Response to Q2: “We have servers in The Netherlands and our company is based in Cyprus. If authorities would contact us we would have to tell them that we have no connection logs or IP-addresses saved on our systems.”

Faceless website

General VPN providers

Anonine

1. We do not keep any logs of any kind no traffic logs, no IP Addresses or timestamps are stored. We only require you to have an email address and a username to signup and that’s it.

2. We operate under Swedish Law, as we don’t store any logs we will never be able to share any information about our users.

Anonine website

IVPN

1. No. As a privacy service and EFF member, IVPN’s main priority is the anonymity of its users. We use non-persistent logs (stored in memory) on our gateway servers. The logs are only stored for 10 minutes. That time window gives us the ability to troubleshoot any connection problems that may appear, but after 10 minutes no trace of activity is stored.

2. IVPN is based in Malta and is subject to its laws. We also have servers in the UK, US, France and Netherlands. We do not share data with 3rd parties. If law enforcement served us with a subpoena and compelled us to log traffic we would shut down the business before cooperating, and relocate to a new jurisdiction.

IVPN website

Proxy.sh

Response to Q1: No information whatsoever is being recorded or held in our facilities. Our services are run from RAM and all our system services come with state-of-the-art configuration that ensures nothing is left after usage. The only information we have about our customers is an e-mail address and the name of the payment method.

2. We are based in Seychelles and we do not communicate with external governments or authorities unless when required by law, or when our ethics tell us to do so (note: read this policy for more details), that is precisely when activities such as child pornography or human rights violation are being reported. But once again, there is very little we can actually share about. And we will always keep you informed of such communication, either via our transparency report, our network issues or our warrant canary.

Proxy.sh website

AirVPN

Response to Q1: The company carries no identifying logs.

Response to Q2: “Jurisdiction is in the EU, under most circumstances Italy (country of the company and home of the person legally responsible for data protection), but applicable law may be one of the EU Member States where the servers of the network are physically located (no servers are in Italy),” AirVPN told us.

“We don’t share any information with anyone.”

AirVPN website

PRQ

Response to Q1: “We do not log anything, not even temporary logs. We do not have any “personal information”, since we only require a working e-mail address to sign up. Many customers use anonymous e-mail services like hushmail and the like. Even if a customer gives us their information, we do not use it.”

Response to Q2: “We fall under Swedish jurisdiction, no circumstances will be accepted to share information, since we do not have any information to share.”

PRQ website

SunVPN website

VPNReactor

Response to Q1: “Only for 5 days to stop abuse[..]. After 5 days we have absolutely no way to match any IP address or time stamp to any users. Privacy and Security is further enhanced for individual users because their VPN connections are basically lost in the crowd.”

“Our free VPN users share a block of IPs when they connect to the internet via VPNReactor. So at any given time hundreds/thousands of our VPN users that have active connections could all be sharing a single IP address. None of our VPN users are assigned individual public IPs.”

Response to Q2: “We strive to be upfront and transparent with our logging policies for the benefit of our VPN users.” Logs seen by TorrentFreak seemed to confirm no identifiable information being stored.

“We are a U.S. based company and are bound by U.S. based court orders,” VPNReactor continued. “However, if a U.S. based subpoena comes in requesting info for activity that occurred more then 5 days prior, we have absolutely nothing to provide as our logs would have expired off. Request for connection details outside a U.S. based court order will be fully ignored.”

VPNReactor website

BlackVPN

Response to Q1: “We do not keep any logs about our users internet activities including which sites they access or what data they transfer. We also run log cleaners on our systems which removes the IPs from logs before they are written to disk,” the company told TorrentFreak.

“For tax and legal reasons we do store some billing information (name, email, country), but it is stored with a third-party and separate from the rest of BlackVPN.”

BlackVPN say they hold a username and email address of their subscribers and the times of connection and disconnection to their services along with bandwidth consumption. Logging is carried out as follows:

“On our Privacy Servers, NL & LT we don’t log anything that can identify the user, but on our US & UK server where we don’t allow sharing copyrighted materials we do log the internal RFC1918 IP that is assigned to the user at a specific time,” BlackVPN explain.

“So to clarify, we don’t log the real external IP of the user, just our RFC1918 internal one, this we have to do to comply with local laws and to be able to handle DMCAs.”

Update: in their FAQ BlackVPN now writes:

“Although we do not monitor the traffic, incoming or outgoing connections of our users we may assign users to a unique IP address and log which user was assigned which IP address at a given time. If we receive a copyright violation notice from the appropriate copyright holder then we will forward the violation to the offending user and may terminate their account. We therefore ask our users not to distribute or transmit material which violates the copyright laws in either your country or the country in which our Service is hosted.”

Response to Q2: “We operate under the jurisdiction of the Netherlands and we will fiercely protect the privacy and rights of our users and we will not disclose any information on our users to anyone, unless forced to by law enforcement personnel that have produced the proper legal compliance documents or a court order. (In which case we don’t really have a choice).”

BlackVPN website

PrivatVPN

Response to Q1: “We don’t keep ANY logs that allow us or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user our service. The only thing we log are e-mails and usernames but it’s not possible to bind a activity on the Internet to a user.”

Please note: PrivatVPN also offer use of a US server for watching services like Hulu. IP logs are kept when users use this service.

Response to Q2: “Since we do not log any IP addresses [we have] nothing to disclose. Circumstances doesn’t matter in this case, we have no information regarding our customers’ IP addresses.”

PrivatVPN website

Privacy.io

Response to Q1: “No logs whatsoever are kept. We therefore simply are not able to hand data out. We believe that if you are not required to have logs, then you shouldn’t. It can only cause issues as seen with the many data leaks in recent years. Should legislation change in the juristictions we operate in, then we’ll move. And if that’s not possible, then we’ll shut the service down. No compromises.”

Response to Q2: “We span several jurisdictions to make our service less prone for legal attacks. Servers are currently located in Sweden. We do not share data because we don’t have it. We built this system because we believe only when communicating anonymously, you can really freely express yourself. As soon as you make a compromise, you are going down a slippery slope to surveilance. People will ask for more and more data retention as seen around the world in many countries recently. We do it because we believe in this, and not for the money.”

Privacy.io website

Mullvad

Response to Q1: “No. And we don’t see why anyone would. It would be dishonest towards our customers and mean *more* potential legal trouble.”

Response to Q2: “Swedish jurisdiction. We don’t know of any way in which the Swedish state in practice could make us behave badly towards our clients and that has never happened. Another sign we take privacy seriously is that we accept payments in Bitcoin and cash in the mail.”

Mullvad website

Cryptocloud

Response to Q1: “We log nothing at all.”

Response to Q2: “We don’t log anything on the customer usage side so there are no dots to connect period, we completely separate the payment information,” they told us.

“Realistically unless you operate out of one of the ‘Axis of Evil Countries” Law Enforcement will find a way to put the screws to you,” Cryptocloud add.

“I have read the nonsense that being in Europe will protect you from US Law Enforcement, worked well for HMA didn’t it? Furthermore I am pretty sure the Swiss Banking veil was penetrated and historically that is more defend-able than individual privacy. The way to solve this is just not to log, period.”

Cryptocloud website

VPN providers who log, sometimes a lot

VyprVPN

VyprVPN is the VPN service connected to and offered by the Giganews Usenet service, although it can be used completely standalone. In common with many other providers we contacted, VyprVPN acknowledged receipt of our questions but then failed to respond. We’ve included them here since they have such a high-profile.

The company policy says that logging data “is maintained for use with billing, troubleshooting, service offering evaluation, [Terms of Service] issues, [Acceptable Use Policy] issues, and for handling crimes performed over the service. We maintain this level of information on a per-session basis for at least 90 days.”

On Usenet forum NZBMatrix several users have reported having their VyprVPN service terminated after the company processed “a backlog” of DMCA notices which pushed them over the “two-strikes-and-out” acceptable use policy.

So, does VyprVPN log? You bet.

SwissVPN

We included SwissVPN in our survey because they are well known, relatively cheap and have been used by those on a tight budget. To their credit, they were also the fastest company to respond. They are one of the few companies that do not make anonymity claims.

Response to Q1: “SwissVPN is being operated based on Swiss Telecommunications and Personal Data Protection Law. Session IP’s (not visited content, websites, mail, etc.) are being logged for 6 months,” the company told us.

Response to Q2: The company responds to requests from 3rd parties under Swiss criminal law (pdf).

SwissVPN website

SunVPN

Response to Q1: “We log on our servers: login date, logout date, username, IP address, time connected, inbound/outbound traffic, errors/warnings. This data is used only for internal reporting: bandwidth usage per user/server, making sure the same VPN account is not connected on 2 or more servers in the same time etc. We do not share this information with any third parties unless for legal reasons (e.g. a subpoena).”

“We DO NOT log our users browsing history or other traffic they make via our servers.”

Response to Q2: “We have servers located in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Romania, Singapore and Hong Kong. We operate under the legislation of the country that hosts the server.”

SunVPN website

StrongVPN

This company did not directly answer our questions but pointed us to their logkeeping policy instead.

StrongVPN do log and are able to match an external IP address to their subscribers. We have included them here since they were the most outwardly aggressive provider in our survey when it came to dealing with infringement.

“StrongVPN does not restrict P2P usage, but please note sharing of Copyrighted materials is forbidden, please do not do this or we will have to take action against your account,” they told us, later adding in a separate mail: “StrongVPN Notice: You may NOT distribute copyright-protected material through our network. We may cancel your account if that happens.”

StrongVPN website

Disappointing: VPN providers who simply failed to respond

In addition to the above, TorrentFreak also approached a number of other fairly well known VPN providers. It’s not clear if our questions were simply too tricky to answer in a positive light or whether there was some other reason, but disappointingly none of them responded to our emails, despite in some cases having acknowledged receipt of our questions.

They include Blacklogic.com, PureVPN.com, VPNTunnel.se [Update: VPNTunnel.se have now responded, see here], Bolehvpn.net [Update: Boleh responded after publication - they carry no logs] and Ivacy.com.

Should the above now feel able to respond directly to our questions, or if there are any other VPN providers reading who would like to be included in a future update, please contact us now with direct responses to the questions above. Apologies to the providers who contacted us at the last minute but were too late to be included in the report – we had to stop somewhere.

Final thoughts

When signing up to a VPN provider it really is evident that their their logging and privacy policies should be read slowly. And then read again, even more slowly than at first. Many are not as straightforward as they first appear (some even seem to be deliberately misleading) and that is the very reason why we asked our own questions instead.

In contrast to the the pessimism generated by yesterday’s report, as we can see from the list above, when it comes to offering real privacy there are plenty of services out there.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.