It’s been two years since the infamous FBI scandal when PureVPN helped the FBI capture an alleged cyberstalker. The cyberstalker, who goes by the name Ryan S. Lin, was arrested by the FBI for stalking and harassing Jennifer Smith, a 24-year old woman who used to share rooms with him.
Lin, who majored in computer science, used his skills to hack Jennifer’s online accounts. What happened next was horrible. He obtained Jennifer’s personal photos, as well as other stuff that was meant to be private. These files and information was shared with different people, including her roommates, co-workers, and her family, without her consent. He even uploaded this information on websites associated with prostitution. And when all this didn’t satisfy him, he used Jennifer’s accounts to threaten people with bomb attacks that led to people calling in the police on her.
The FBI finally took on the case and managed to capture Lin with the help of PureVPN. Though, this was done for a good cause, many people took on PureVPN questioning the brand’s involvement in the FBI scandal. Among the questions asked from the VPN service were these:
- Does PureVPN keep logs of user data?
- Is PureVPN really privacy friendly?
PureVPN answered all these questions in a statement few days later when it explained that the information shared with the FBI didn’t contain any logs that reveal a person’s identity or browsing activities. The company also added more transparency into its privacy-policy and made it GDPR compliant. In its privacy policy page, PureVPN states:
“We DO NOT keep any record of your browsing activities, connection logs, records of the VPN IPs assigned to you, your original IPs, your connection time, the history of your browsing, the sites you visited, your outgoing traffic, the content or data you accessed, or the DNS queries generated by you.”
But despite all this, some people continued to question the reliability of the VPN service and looked towards it in a suspicious way.
This is when the VPN brand decided to curb all of these suspicions once and for all. PureVPN allowed Altius IT, one of the most experienced and reliable IT auditor, to perform an audit of PureVPN network and verify if the VPN service stays true to its claim of keeping zero logs.
Altius performed an extensive audit and certified that PureVPN actually stores zero-logs of user data. You can read the complete statement from Altius IT below:
“Altius IT 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.”
So, after two years of receiving unjust backlash from so many people, PureVPN has finally proved its innocence in this case.
Henry Lares is still early into his career as tech reporter but has already had his work published in many major publications including Tech Crunch and the Huffington Post. In regards to academics, Henry earned an engineering degree from Apex Technical School. Henry has a passion for emerging technology and covers upcoming products and breakthroughs in science and tech.
