NordVPN has revealed today that it is committed to meeting the VPN Trust Initiative (VTI) Principles by the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (“i2Coalition”), the leading voice for web hosting companies, data centres, domain registrars and registries, cloud infrastructure providers, managed services providers and other foundational Internet technologies.
The VPN Trust Initiative formally launched in December 2019 as a consortium of VPN business leaders focused on building understanding, strengthening trust and mitigating risk for VPN users and providers. The VTI is dedicated to ensuring VPN users gain the most benefits from this technology.
The VTI Principles offer a comprehensive set of best practices for VPNs providers to bolster consumer confidence and provider accountability and ultimately increase VPN adoption and access to the technology’s benefits.
The VTI Principles have been informed by input from civil society and other outside experts to protect the privacy and security of VPN users, offer practical policy guidelines for VPN providers and ensure policymakers, regulators and the wider market have access to criteria for evaluating these technologies. The principles focus on five key areas: security, privacy, advertising practices, disclosure and transparency and social responsibility.
NordVPN lends weight and credibility to the VTI Principles in its participation.
“The release of VTI Principles and Standards sets a bar for the whole industry,” said Tom Okman, co-founder of NordVPN. “In the last few years, the number of VPN service providers has skyrocketed. From the societal point of view, this is a positive turn, giving people freedom of choice on how and by whom their data should be handled. However, the rapid industry growth has also brought a lack of clarity. VPN providers operate in different ways, and not necessarily all of them apply the best standards when developing their service. VTI understood that and sought to create a set of principles: guidelines on which the services could rely. We hope that these principles will help the industry to become more trustworthy, transparent and secure.”
The VTI formally launched in December 2019 as an industry-led and member-driven consortium of VPN business leaders focused on building understanding, strengthening trust and mitigating risk for VPN users and providers. The VTI is dedicated to creating and releasing resources to serve as a singular voice that provides appropriate and accurate industry-led stewardship.
“Releasing the VTI Principles is an inaugural step in what is an ongoing process of aligning industry voices to advocate, create, vet and validate industry policies and guidelines, and we’re excited to see the benefits for the market growth through their adoption,” said Christian Dawson, Co-Founder of the i2Coalition. “By creating and distributing resources such as the VTI Principles to the market, we’re helping to establish a beneficial and self-regulated accountability model that not only ensures trust and security, it helps the reputation and use of these important VPN technologies to thrive, driving greater adoption.”
The founding five VTI members include ExpressVPN; NordVPN; VyprVPN; Surfshark; and NetProtect (whose VPN brands include encrypt.me, WLVPN, SugarSync, IPVanish, StrongVPN, OverPlay, and SaferVPN). Companies that have since joined the initiative include Ivacy VPN, CloudFlare, Mysterium Network, GoldenFrog, Hide.me and WeVPN.
The VTI aims to reach consumers, legislators and technologists, promoting appropriate industry-led stewardship, providing accurate information to policymakers, informing the greater technology sphere and collaboratively establishing solutions to pressing VPN challenges.
