Interview with ZenVPN
0)Please tell us, what is your role (in the VPN company, where do you stand, owner, marketer, advertiser etc)?
How about chief hacker?
1) Does ZenVPN keep any logs, IP Addresses, Timestamps, Bandwidth caps, Traffic or other data?
No. We don’t maintain any records of any activities on our customers’ VPN connections.
2) What type of Encryption do you use?
Sorry, but I am going to deliberately leave this unanswered. I think the whole attempt of the VPN industry to present encryption strength as some one-dimensional characteristic (akin to engine power output in a car) for marketing purposes is harmful. Consumers aren’t really equipped to make informed decisions about crypto used in VPNs and all the labels like “XXX-bit encryption” do is confuse them and give false sense of security. Worse, they are often intentionally misleading: for instance, many vendors publish the length of the asymmetric crypto key used in key exchange algorithm because they are longer than the actual keys used to encrypt the data being transmitted.
Let me put it this way instead: if you are stealing military secrets from China or running Silk Road, you are going to have to figure out this crypto
stuff and set up a VPN for yourself. In all other cases, ZenVPN gives you as good a protection as any.
3) Where are your servers located and what jurisdiction do you operate under?
At the moment we have servers in US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, France, Germany, Russia, India, Hong Kong, Singapore and Chile, but we are constantly adding new locations as we are trying to bring the latency overhead to absolute minimum for all our clients regardless of their location. We have always up-to-date map of our datacenter locations on our website: https://zenvpn.net/en/vpn-locations/ We operate under the jurisdiction of Commonwealth of Dominica.
4) How do you generally handle requests from law enforcement and copyright agencies?
The only kind of request we are bound by law to abide is an order of Dominica court. Thus far we haven’t received any such orders. We do not consider or respond to any other types of requests.
5) Do you have access to all your servers, and does the datacenter you use log?
Yes, we have access to all our servers. It’s an implication of a customer convenience tradeoff inherent to our architecture.
We use a diverse set of datacenters some of which undoubtedly log. In fact I strongly suspect pretty much every datacenter logs even if they tell you otherwise (with the possible exception of explicitly privacy-oriented ones).
6) Does your service support bittorrent?
Absolutely. Unconditional Bittorrent support does come at a considerable cost to us, but we strongly believe banning/restricting it would be a form of censorship and thus would completely defy the whole point of our service. Also, if a VPN provider gives in to the bullying of copyright trolls which are private organizations that don’t have any real authority, how can you expect them to withstand any pressure from actual government agencies?
