PureVPN, the Hong Kong-based virtual private network service owned by GZ Systems Ltd. has hired an independent auditor to confirm their “no-logs” policy. The auditor is Altius IT, a California-based expert in the field with over 25 years of experience in IT audits, penetration testing, and cybersecurity. The no-logs policy that is claimed by PureVPN is simply a promise that the company doesn’t store any user data on its systems. While many like to promote their services as such, few are actually hiring an independent third party to test the claims and certify them.
We have seen such audits going well for ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and TunnelBear, so with their Altius IT audit, PureVPN is joining a small club of trustworthy VPN vendors. So, here is what Altius had to say about PureVPN:
“Altius IT started its audit by going through PureVPN’s privacy policy, clause by clause. It reviewed all the logging-related statements and compared them against the technical server configurations and systems. We 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.”
There’s a reason why Altius IT has carefully chosen to say that PureVPN is not keeping any log files that could help identify an individual, and that reason is that PureVPN is logging some basic user data. According to their own privacy policy, PureVPN is storing the Internet Service Provider and VPN location that is used by its customers, as well as the bandwidth data. This is purely to help the service deliver a better experience to its customers, and we should point out that other VPN providers are doing the same too.
In our in-depth review of PureVPN, the product scored 5.1 out of 10, as we have found privacy issues, detected data leaks, and also noticeable throttling. On the positive side, PureVPN is a low-cost package that can still help those who want to unblock certain websites, offers thousands of servers all around the globe, and comes with strong traffic data encryption. To be fair, it’s been eight months since we last scrutinized PureVPN, which could potentially mean that a lot has changed for the better.
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