The Digital Age Requires Special Precautions: Even with VPNs

A data breach happened at Yahoo in 2013 that ended up exposing its 3 billion users' accounts. In 2014, over 100 million users' personal details were compromised when a cyberattack hit eBay.

Fast forward to 2019, a security mishap at Facebook ended up leaking 419 million phone numbers. Well, that's nothing new for our favorite social media giant, but it means a lot to users' who live in constant fear of falling victim to such leaks someday.

In the VPN industry, the fear of users isn't about the data breaches but the privacy leak associated with some VPNs, especially when it comes to keeping logs.

Data Logs & VPNs

There's been a long debate between VPN users and VPN providers related to the latter keeping records of users' usage history and connection records. While some VPN providers do keep logs, there are some especially the top-tier services that claim of keeping no logs at all.

Verbal claims only suffice when the users give them any concern. However, there are some skeptical ones (they have the right of being so) who want a more substantial proof.

To ease the fears of the concerned users, the VPN industry has started getting their claims audited by independent auditors.

Third-Party No-Log Auditing

Auditing allows a company to add an extra layer of transparency to its services or the claims they make. In the VPN industry, audit is given more weight mainly because of the sensitive nature of the services. Moreover, it adds accountability which is what a user expects from a service.

There are already many top-tier VPN providers who have gotten their claims evaluated and validated by independent auditors. One such recent name that has joined the rank of the elites is PureVPN.

PureVPN engaged a third-party auditor to evaluate its systems thoroughly and compare its claims of keeping no connection records or logs against its network operations. The independent auditor, Altius IT, stated in its report that it:

"did not find any evidence of system configurations and/or system/service log files that independently, or collectively, could lead to identifying a specific person and/or the person's activity when using the PureVPN service."

The vpn no-logs certification awarded to PureVPN by the California-based third-party auditor even resulted in good reviews by the VPN users.