"No Logs" — What It Actually Means Technically and How to Verify It
The phrase "we don't keep logs" appears on almost every VPN site — and almost never comes with an explanation of what it actually means. It can mean very different things: from "we genuinely write nothing down" to "we don't show this in the interface, but the server keeps everything."
What kinds of logs even exist
It's worth distinguishing three different types of data that get loosely called "logs":
- Activity logs — which sites and services a user visited, which domains and IPs their traffic went through. This is the most sensitive thing a VPN could possibly collect.
- Connection logs — connection time, amount of traffic transferred, the IP a user connected from. Technically more harmless, but can still de-anonymize someone when cross-referenced with external data.
- Account data — an email or other login identifier, payment status, subscription expiry date. This isn't "logs" in the usual sense — it's what a service with a customer account technically cannot function without.
What our "no logs" actually means
We don't log the first two categories: neither where traffic went, nor detailed connection statistics. What is stored is only what falls under the third category — data necessary for the subscription itself to function (for example, when a paid period expires).
How to verify a promise instead of just taking it on faith
An honest sign is a privacy policy that directly lists which data is stored, rather than settling for a vague "we respect your privacy." A second sign is whether the servers' actual technical configuration matches the claim: if a provider states it doesn't log traffic, but the servers have detailed proxy logging switched on "just in case," that's a mismatch between the words and the settings.
We prefer to say plainly what exactly we store, rather than operate with a nice-sounding but empty phrase.