Nord VPN may quit India after government mandates storing user data

Nord VPN, one of the leading VPN providers, may shut its Indian servers to comply with its no-log policy, which the Indian government wants violated to implement the new law.

Nord VPN, one of the leading VPN service providers, has warned that India’s new regulations for virtual private network providers that mandate them to store user data may cause it to shut down its Indian servers. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, earlier this week, passed a regulation that VPN providers, as well as cryptocurrency exchanges, must maintain records of users for five years — a move that defies the purpose of using private networks.

“We are committed to protecting the privacy of our customers therefore, we may remove our servers from India if no other options are left,” Patricija Cerniauskaite, spokesperson for Nord VPN’s parent company, Nord Security, was quoted as saying in a report by Entrackr.

A virtual private network is used to reroute the internet traffic to pre-allotted private servers for several purposes. For instance, your office may use its own private network for internal websites which are not accessible on the public internet. VPNs, otherwise, are heavily used to access blocked websites through servers of other countries where those websites are not banned.

Many VPN services, such as Nord VPN, stress privacy of users is paramount, which is why they claim to neither store the IP location of the machine used to access their network nor the customer's online data — except for the account details that you use to sign in to these networks. These services are mostly available for a fee, which is why those using free VPN services tend to give away their data to the VPN provider.

Specifically, Nord VPN has a no-log policy, which means it will not maintain a log of anything that its users do on their network, giving them a sense of complete privacy. The company’s no-log policy is periodically audited by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which is a multinational professional services network of firms. The Indian government’s new regulation demands that Nord VPN breaks its policy for its Indian servers and start maintaining the log of the users that connect to these servers. Since the rule applies to only Indian servers of Nord VPN — which the company is likely to shut because it cannot comply with the government’s demand, Indian users should still be able to connect to Nord’s servers in other countries.

Nord VPN has 28 servers in India currently, seemingly hosted at facilities that belong to Edgoo Networks in Mumbai. The company also had servers in Chennai but those were closed a few months back. These servers allow both Indian and foreign users to connect to them to access private networks. If the company decides to shut these servers in Mumbai, too, it will possibly be a wrap-up for one of the leading VPN providers globally.

“At the moment, our team is investigating the new directive recently passed by the Indian government and exploring the best course of action. As there are still at least two months left until the law comes into effect, we are currently operating as usual,” Cerniauskaite said.