Cyberstalking Suspect Arrested After VPN Providers Shared Logs With the FBI (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: "VPN providers often advertise their products as a method of surfing the web anonymously, claiming they never store logs of user activity," writes Bleeping Computer, "but a recent criminal case shows that at least some do store user activity logs." According to the FBI, VPN providers played a key role in identifying an aggressive cyberstalker by providing detailed logs to authorities, even if they claimed in their privacy policies that they don't. The suspect is a 24-year-old man that hacked his roommate, published her private journal, made sexually explicit collages, sent threats to schools in the victim's name, and registered accounts on adult portals, sending men to the victim's house...
FBI agents also obtained Google records on their suspect, according to a 29-page affidavit which, ironically, includes the text of one of his tweets warning people that VPN providers do in fact keep activity logs. "If they can limit your connections or track bandwidth usage, they keep logs."

Comments

Re: So

[JohnFen]

And WANSecurity.

But the take-home lesson here shouldn't be that if you avoid those you're good. The lesson is that in the end, you're taking every provider's word for security. Certainly some are good and some aren't, but there is literally no way for you to be able to tell which ones are good.

Re:Good reminder

[JohnFen]

That's not the reasoning. Some are surely trustworthy. The underlying problem is that you literally have no way to tell which ones those are.

Re:Get a VPN they said ...

[AmiMoJo]

It also forces the security services to actively target you and expend some extra effort to get your data.

In some countries, e.g. the UK, ISPs are required to log and hand over such data pretty much on demand to the police, and of course you have outfits like GCHQ and the NSA doing mass surveillance.

A VPN increases to cost to spy on you from nearly zero to something that will discourage casual snooping and a lot of abuse. It's not perfect but it's a useful line of defence.