Independent audit
An examination of a provider’s systems or policy by an external firm, published with the firm’s name, the date, and the scope.
Glossary
No-logs policy
A provider’s commitment not to record which sites you visit, when you connected, or what address you connected from.
Why it matters
It is the entire product. A VPN moves your traffic from your ISP’s visibility to your VPN provider’s, so the only thing you gain is a provider that keeps less than the ISP would. If the provider logs, you have swapped one observer for another and paid for the privilege.
What most explanations leave out
No-logs is unverifiable from the outside. Nobody can inspect a server they do not control, so the claim rests on an audit, a court case, or trust. Treat "no-logs verified" as marketing language: the honest version names who checked, when, and what they were allowed to look at.
Related terms
Warrant canary
A regularly updated statement that a provider has not received a secret legal demand, whose disappearance implies that it has.
RAM-only server
A server that runs entirely from volatile memory, so a reboot or a seizure leaves nothing behind on disk.
Referenced from
Terms are defined here because they appear in our scoring rubric or in provider reviews, not to fill a glossary.