ExpressVPN, PureVPN, and others to cease operating physical VPN servers in India or start collecting extensive user data.
All VPN companies received orders from the Indian government to collect and store extensive customer data. Furthermore, they will be required to maintain the data for five years or more.
According to the new directive, VPN companies are supposed to collect and report the following:
- Customer names, physical address, email address, and phone numbers.
- The reason for using the service, the exact dates of their activity, and their “ownership pattern.”
- The original IP address combined with an email address that customer used to register and the registration time stamp.
- All IP addresses that were issued to a customer by the VPN.
This will impact all VPN providers and their users. As a company focused on protecting privacy and freedom of expression online, most VPNs with a no-log policy will never log user activity. However, they will have to adjust their operations and infrastructure to preserve this principle if and when necessary.
Therefore, VPN service providers will cease operations of physical VPN servers in India.
In many cases, this will not impact users based in India or those who wish to use an Indian IP address, as VPN companies will continue operating Indian virtual server locations. Therefore, users based in India will be able to continue using VPNs as usual.
