I've recently had an experience with a apparently 'good' vpn that raises questions for me. I won't name the vpn at the moment as it's more the general issue that interests me. The vpn is an apparently reasonably large one, is clear that is does no logging and allows sign up via private means. (It also says torrenting is OK on all servers) After running it fine for a week, with good speeds, I found my account was inactive, so contacted their support, to be told that my account had been deactivated because of a copyright complaint to one of their (Romanian) servers and they were at risk of losing it. I wasn't actually aware that I was sharing anything that would be 'popular' - it's mostly audiobooks and occasional software (that I already own) for 'testing purposes'. On one hand it's fair enough I guess - most vpns at least on paper disallow sharing copyright material and I don't expect a company to take a fall for me at around $10 a month. They reactivated my account once I said I wouldn't share copyright material. My main question is this: If a provider doesn't log, how would they know my account was the guilty party? Because I tend to leave the vpn connected constantly to withhold everything from my isp, I guess its possible that I was still connected to the same session at the time they checked given the complaint must have happened very recently as I'd only been with them 7 days. I would have expected most vpns to use shared IP addresses that would make it very difficult to know which user to deactivate in this case - at worst I would expect them to disable torrents on that server if it became a problem. Should this sort of behaviour from a VPN be a red flag that they are not going to do much if / when approached by authorities, with legal power or not. Follow up question: I guess all vpns can see in real time who is connected to which IP address, regardless of logs, so should a privacy aware individual change servers, or at least reconnect regularly, to improve privacy?
I have never heard of such a thing on any of the top 5 VPNs the advanced users here recommend (maybe more than 5). There have been instances where a barrage of DMCA's have caused a provider to shutdown a particular server. In the USA there are several top providers that disallow certain file sharing because they know the DMCA's are going to roll in. On those providers you simply go over to the Netherlands or similar when you want to download "such" files, but reconnect in the USA when you want simply privacy. My providers don't do that in the USA but they have lost a few servers over DMCA's. Its a complete non-issue for me because my exit node is TOR so not even my VPN's (two minimum at a time) will ever see a DMCA from me.
I did find it surprising - the vpn was securevpn.to - which seems otherwise to have a decent reputation and be set up for privacy, but the very fact that they were able relatively quickly to identify a user based on a complaint (dcma or otherwise) which presumably stated an IP address only (and maybe pot number) suggests that you are putting all your faith in the people running it. I've seen many of the other vpns claim that they could not identify users in such a way, even if they wanted to. I suspect that has to be taken with a pinch of salt if they were really minded to, but I certainly wouldn't expect them to do so for just a complaint
