PureVPN Decides To Remove Servers From India

PureVPN is now the fourth major VPN provider that has decided to remove its servers from India after the central government directed VPN providers to collect and store customer data. 

British Virgin Islands-based PureVPN has decided to remove physical servers from India after the country's government directives on storing user data were not amended despite some debate.

The directions came from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a functional organisation under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on April 28, 2022. The directives are supposed to go online today onwards.

CERT-In's directives ask VPN providers to store customer information such as names, email IDs, IP addresses. All companies are required to maintain this data for five years. 

In the past month, three major VPN providers including NordVPN, Surfshark, and ExpressVPN have chosen to remove their physical servers from the country as they felt that the directives impinged on user privacy. 

PureVPN has said that those users who wish to avail the services from Indian servers will still be able to do so through virtual servers.

"We are a strict no-log company. While we do not collect any identifiable information from our users, we cannot operate physical servers in a country where we will be forced to change our operating methods and compromise our users' privacy and security", said Head of MarCom, PureVPN, Shaheryar Popalzai.

"We are not new to virtual servers, so users will not see any difference in terms of quality or experience when they connect to the India virtual server. Users will get the same privacy and security they did with physical servers. We are already running virtual servers for multiple locations such as Bangladesh, Bahrain, Egypt etc", he added.

PureVPN’s CEO Uzair Gadit had already expressed his concern over Indian government’s move. He had said that his company stood in solidarity with all internet users who are at risk.