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Comment by supercanuck | Hacker News Reader

Any recommendations on VPN Providers?

EDIT: I saw this further down: https://www.getcloak.com

http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anon...

My personal choice is privateinternetaccess.com: $40/year, unlimited bandwidth (cloak and many others limit bandwidth), multiple platforms (Windows/MAC/*nix/iOS/Android), multiple protocols (PPTP, OpenVPN and IPSEC/L2TP), multiple gateways (US/UK/Switzerland), and most importantly, NO user activity logs.

It's beyond me how providers who operate in the EU space, hence under the 2006 Data-Retention Directive, can claim "no user activity logs" are kept. Either they do retain logon-logoff times, or they're technically breaking the law -- unless the directive has not been adopted yet in the specific country, in which case they're just exploiting a temporary loophole. I'm pretty sure any VPN operating on UK nodes would need to retain logon/logoff times linked to individual subscriber data; they won't have to log website access, but that's about it.

Company's response:

We utilize shared IP addresses rather than dynamic or static IPs, so it is not possible to match a user to an external IP.

Also:

We maintain logs describing the time at which a client connects, length of connection time, source IP, as well as payment information. We use custom hashing to maintain separation between our payments database and user database.

My interpretation is, under a court order, authorities can, with considerable difficulty, force a match between a criminal request and several users, but not one user.

Reasonable enough for me - I believe in good-enough security through obscurity given enough obscurity - YMMV of course.

I use http://www.goldenfrog.com/vyprvpn

Presumably, vyprvpn logs user activity for 90 days so users are not protected if there is a court order.

A fair amount of research suggests this company subscribes to the GoDaddy school of thought about your privacy.

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