Information Technology Security

In the meantime, at least five major VPN players have decided to remove their physical VPN servers from the country. By Michael Kan, PC Magazine India’s new policy that requires VPN services to log and potentially turn over data on their customers was supposed to go into effect on Monday, but the country has decided to push back the date by three months.  The policy is now set to go into effect on Sept. 25. The Indian government settled on the new date, citing requests from companies asking for an extension.  “Further, additional time has been sought for implementation of mechanism for validation of subscribers/customers by Data Centres, Virtual Private Server (VPS) providers, Cloud Service providers and Virtual Private Network Service (VPN Service) providers,” Indian authorities announced on Tuesday.  India introduced the policy back in May with the goal of helping the country fight cybercrime. Soon, all internet and cloud service providers will need to maintain logs of ...

Other providers are signaling they'll oppose the new policy in India, which will require VPN providers to collect and turn over data on customers. By Michael Kan, PC Mag India’s new policy requiring VPN services to collect and hand over data on customers is prompting NordVPN to consider pulling its servers from the country.  “We are committed to protecting the privacy of our customers; therefore, we may remove our servers from India if no other options are left,” NordVPN told us. India is implementing the new policy to help it fight cybercrime. But the data-collection requirement also undermines the whole point of installing a VPN, which are often designed to protect a user's privacy.  Under the new policy, VPN providers would need to log data on which IP addresses their customers are using and store the information for at least five years. As a result, the data could be used to map out customers' web activities if it’s ever turned over to Indian authorities.  NordVPN sa...