Published on: July 31, 2024
Two of the top-ranked VPN on the market, CyberGhost VPN and Private Internet Access (PIA), have released their Q2 2024 transparency reports, providing detailed insights into data requests they’ve received and their ongoing commitment to user privacy.
Both VPN services publish a transparency report every three months, and this quarter, their reports list all legal requests they received for data, the type of requests, and how they weren’t able to comply with any (because they don’t keep logs of user data).
“As usual, we’re unable to comply with these requests. We abide by a strict no-logs policy, and our RAM-only servers are meant to regularly wipe data. We don’t know anything about what you do online while connected to our servers, and we are under no legal obligation to store user data. Because of this, we don’t have anything to share with the authorities,” CyberGhost’s blog reads.
CyberGhost said it received a total of 534,449 legal requests, which is a 44% increase compared to its Q1 report. Of these, only 2 (or 0.1%) of the requests were sent by law enforcement agencies. 38.2% were DMCA-related, which means they came from individuals or companies that said a CyberGhost IP address was used to share copyrighted materials.
A staggering 61.7% of all requests came from institutions claiming malicious activity related to a CyberGhost IP address. CyberGhost said it responded to this by implementing measures to mitigate abuse and that this “seems to have halved the reports in the following months of Q2.”
On the other side, Private Internet Access reported receiving a total of 90 legal requests in the second quarter of 2024. These requests included 27 subpoenas, 3 warrants, 30 foreign notices, 13 state notices, 17 federal notices, and 30 foreign and informal requests. Notably, there were no court orders during this period.
“Despite these numbers, we cannot produce any logs to the relevant authorities. We have a strict no-logs policy in place. Our no-logs policy means that we do not provide logs because there are none to provide. We do not collect, monitor, or store any data regarding your online activities,” PIA’s blog highlights.