Jurisdiction
The country whose law governs the company operating the VPN, which determines who can compel it and by what process.
Glossary
Fourteen Eyes
Also called: Five Eyes, Nine Eyes
A set of intelligence-sharing arrangements between allied states, expanding from the original five to fourteen participants.
Why it matters
A provider incorporated inside one of these states is more exposed to routine legal process whose results can be shared with the others, which is why jurisdiction is a scored criterion here.
What most explanations leave out
Being outside the agreement is not immunity — every country has legal process. And the arrangement concerns intelligence sharing between states, not a mechanism for compelling companies. A provider holding no identifying data in a Fourteen Eyes country may be a smaller target than one holding full records outside it.
Related terms
Warrant canary
A regularly updated statement that a provider has not received a secret legal demand, whose disappearance implies that it has.
No-logs policy
A provider’s commitment not to record which sites you visit, when you connected, or what address you connected from.
Terms are defined here because they appear in our scoring rubric or in provider reviews, not to fill a glossary.