One of the key reasons that people use VPNs is the privacy of their browsing data. VPNs can provide browsing privacy from both your ISP and your government. One potential issue with using a VPN though is that the VPN provider can monitor and log all of your browsing data instead. Unfortunately, you can’t really check if your VPN provider is logging your browsing data yourself. That’s where your VPN provider’s privacy policy comes in. In this article, we’ll review NordVPN’s privacy policy to see if they keep usage logs.
A lot of privacy policies are written in obscure legalese that makes it really difficult for the average reader to understand. Helpfully, NordVPN has written its privacy policy in a way that is easy to read and understand.
The Privacy Policy
NordVPN’s privacy policy states that it does not monitor, record, log, store, or pass data on to third parties regarding your usage of its VPN service. Furthermore, NordVPN “do not store connection time stamps, session information, used bandwidth, traffic logs, IP addresses, or other data.”
To further back up its privacy policy, a full independent audit of NordVPN was performed by PricewaterhouseCoopers. While the full audit report cannot be published, it is available for download to NordVPN subscribers. The audit confirmed that as of the date of the audit, November 1st, 2018, NordVPN is compliant with its no-logs claim in the privacy policy.
Personal and Service Data
One thing to be aware of is that NordVPN does store a small amount of personal information, although that is limited to only what is required for their service to run. For instance, your email address associated with your account, your payment details, and any communications with users through the “Contact Us” and “Community Area” pages.
The privacy policy also states that the limited personal data stored will be kept for no longer than two years after your last use of the App and/or the Services, although you can request that your personal data be deleted earlier. This means that if you decide to close your account, your personal data will be automatically deleted after two years, or earlier upon request. Additionally, if you want to view the personal data NordVPN has stored on you, you can request a copy of all of your data under your data protection rights.
NordVPN also has server performance monitors in place, which is used to monitor system resources and stability.
Conclusion
NordVPNs privacy policy and independent audit confirm that they do not keep any logs or monitor usage data. They also only store the minimum amount of personal data needed to be able to provide service to you.
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