A VPN is supposed to protect your privacy, not monitor your activity. Learn how to know if your VPN is keeping logs of your online behavior, why it matters, and what you can do about it.
When VPNs mention «logs», they’re talking about records of your online activity—like your personal info, browsing history, and data usage. Most websites and services, including your internet service provider, already collect this kind of data using cookies, trackers, and ads. These bits of information help build a digital fingerprint that can be used to identify you and target you with ads. While a VPN can help block this kind of tracking, it also has the ability to collect logs itself. Here’s how to find out if your VPN keeps logs—and why that matters for your privacy.Does Every VPN Keep Logs?
It depends. Most make sufficient efforts to minimize data retention, but the majority retain some form of temporary data just so you can use the service. A good VPN won’t retain identifying information such as your IP address or browsing activity. However, some services do keep anonymized aggregate data for analytics. While it isn’t very likely for this information to be used in a malicious attack, it is still personal data, and it could theoretically be used to identify you.
You’ll see the term “no-log VPN” used by a lot of services. A service that uses this term claims that it doesn’t keep user data in any accessible form. However, some short-form retention is necessary for a network application to work properly.
