Surfshark has announced that it will shut down its VPN (Virtual Private Network) service in India. The Indian Government has released a new guideline for the VPN service providing companies to record and store details of their customers. Soon after the release of the guideline, Surfshark declared of terminating its service in India.
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued the new regulation, which will come into effect this year around the end of June. This incident has received criticism from a section of society. VPN service-providing companies have condemned the regulation saying that VPN services are used to provide complete privacy to the users by encrypting their network traffic and IP address.
VPN services are used for various reasons from protecting public Wi-Fi to masking browser and torrent history from receiving data packets. If there isn’t any VPN present at the site, the data packets travelling the internet can reveal the user’s IP address to the online services. This can allow unwanted websites to collect data and personal information.
In a recent statement, Surfshark’s explained its no-logs policy, “Surfshark VPN does not keep track of your online whereabouts or actions in any way. The VPN server only keeps enough data to keep your VPN connection going.”
However, according to the newly added provision in section 70B for the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000, a VPN provider should abandon their core values by retaining their customer’s details.
