VPNs 'need better industry standards' to tackle privacy, security concerns, experts say

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More Chinese are using VPNs to circumvent the 'Great Firewall', but in doing so, the privacy of their data could be in jeopardy. Photo: EPA

Published: 8:00am, 16 Jul 2015

Experts and industry insiders are calling for commercial virtual private network providers to adopt more stringent privacy and security guidelines in the wake of a damning report by British and Italian researchers.

Commercial VPNs charge customers to help them bypass internet restrictions and encrypt their internet data to avoid snoops and official surveillance. The restrictions could be imposed by a government, like China’s Great Firewall, a business or even a school.

Or at least that is the idea. But a new study released this month by researchers from the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the University of Rome showed that fourteen of the world's most popular VPN services were "leaking customer data".

"There are hundreds of commercial VPN companies out there, they don’t [care] about security or privacy," Robert Knapp, chief executive and co-founder of Bucharest-based CyberGhost VPN, told the South China Morning Post.

Knapp said that there was a lack of industry standards to ensure that VPN companies live up to minimum privacy and security requirements.

His concerns reflect those of the British and Italian researchers, who warned that claims made by providers on security, privacy and even technical matters like download speed or number of servers "have not received a sufficiently detailed scrutiny".