More than 1/3rd of VPNs have unclear logging policies

More than a third of VPNs have unclear logging policies

The two core features users expect from their VPNs are security and privacy.

Figuring out how secure your VPN is can be fairly straightforward. Just take a look at the details of how it encrypts your data and you can get a pretty good idea of how secure a VPN will make you.

The level of privacy a VPN offers is much harder to ascertain though, especially for regular users who may not be familiar with a lot of technical terminology.

Which is why VPNCompare.co.uk has done some digging to see just how open and transparent VPNs are about their privacy policies.

They arranged for one of their non-technical staff, Carolina, to visit the websites of a whopping 193 different VPNs. As they noted, VPNs these days are used by “everyday users from teenagers, to grandparents and anyone in between” meaning it is vital that these privacy policies are comprehensible to non-technical people.

Carolina job was to see just how easy she found it to figure out what their logging policies were. The results are now in and it doesn’t make for reassuring reading for the VPN sector.

What we discovered

Carolina only had two simple things to do. She had to find each VPNs privacy policy and then try and understand to what extent they protected users privacy.

She found that more than a third of VPNs, 36% in total, either offered no information about their privacy policies or the information that was available was difficult to understand.

Of those, 20% of VPNs offered no information at all. That means one-in-five VPNs effectively have no privacy policy at all. In other words, they could be doing anything with your internet data and you would have no justification to challenge them.

Another 16% of VPNs did offer a privacy policy but it was insufficiently clear for Carolina to fully understand. They either didn’t specify what data they logged or how long they retained that data for or both.

How easy is it to find this data?

VPNCompare.co.uk also asked Carolina to comment on how easy it was to find the privacy policies of each website. Her findings here were not good news either.

She found that 25% of the VPNs she looked at had policies which she considered to be ‘difficult’ to find. That means one in every four VPN has a privacy policy that is difficult to find.

This is not good news because transparency is crucial for all VPNs if they are going to gain the trust of their users.

VPN use in the UK is on the rise and all experts are advocating internet users to use a VPN to ensure the security and privacy of their data. Most people sign up for exactly these reasons. But if privacy policies are hidden away, it is very difficult for people to make an informed decision.

The good news

These figures are troubling but our research isn’t all bad news. If 36% of VPNs do not have clear privacy policies, that means that 64% of VPNs do.

A total of 122 of the 193 VPNs looked at by VPNCompare.co.uk offered clear information about their logging policies and were clear about just how private they would keep your data.

That is not to say that all of these VPNs offered good privacy policies, but they were at least transparent about how they deal with your data.

That being said, there are still some standout VPNs providers that deserve special comment. The likes of ExpressVPN, VPN.ac, and Private Internet Access are not only transparent about their privacy policies but also have policies that we are happy to recommend.

Equally, 75% of VPNs do have privacy policies which are easy to find. This means that three-quarters of VPNs are transparent about their privacy practices.

If you are having trouble finding out how a VPN provider plans to keep your data private, the best thing to do is take a look at our reviews.

Every time we review a VPN, we dig out their privacy policy and look through it in detail. Then we pick out the key information to give you a clear assessment of just how good their privacy protections are.

By David Spencer, who is VPNCompare’s Cyber-Security News Editor reporting on security breaches, privacy issues and censorship from across the world. When not writing, David is studying Mandarin.

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