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
What is No-logs policy?
No-logs policy is a provider’s commitment not to record which sites you visit, when you connected, or what address you connected from. 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.
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
Questions
- What is No-logs policy?
- A provider’s commitment not to record which sites you visit, when you connected, or what address you connected from.
- Why does No-logs policy matter when choosing a VPN?
- 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 do most explanations of No-logs policy 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.
Terms are defined here because they appear in our scoring rubric or in provider reviews, not to fill a glossary.