> And remember that it is in a VPN provider's best interest to log their users - it lets them deflect blame to the customer, if they ever were to get into legal trouble.<p>Hmmm? If you don't have record of it, the courts don't do much, at least in the US. If they subpoena you, and you don't have logs, nothing ever comes out of it. Outside of fines and things of that nature.<p>> The $10/month that you're paying for your VPN service doesn't even pay for the lawyer's coffee, so expect them to hand you over.<p>How do you think insurance works, or why airlines habitually overbook?
A trivial word problem if you will:
If you had 10,000 users, you were subpoena'd and only 100 users did anything worth prosecution, that's what. For one lawyer, drinking a $10 coffee (or two $5 dollar) every week day for a month. that's 20 days, $200 a month. $2,400 annually. Assuming in this example only 1% of your users need defending, that's 99% of your coffee budget you don't have to worry about! For 10,000 users, a yearly subscription pulls in about $1,200,000 (we aren't doing any adjustment for taxes and all that garbage). If 99% of your users are behaving themselves.. or at least not doing something bad enough for the courts to take notice (which in the digital age, things like piracy are white noise) that means you still have $1,188,000 to help you in those, typically blanket cases (i.e. a court case in which 20 of your users were downloading illegal movies, and MGM got really upset). Since if you aren't logging, these infractions are dealt with in aggregate usually, since it can't be quantified. So number of lawsuits < bad users.<p>That's not bad, if all your lawyers needed was coffee monthly, then you could support, with 99% of your users cash, 495 lawyers coffee for a year! more than enough coffee to defend your business. Don't forget you can still use the "blood money" you got to buy them coffee!<p>The basic principle behind my oversimplified, and somewhat tongue-in-cheek example was to remind you that insurance is a lucrative business. I wonder how they survive if your monthly cost for liability (up to $500,000) isn't $500,000 per month!?!