Buffered VPN is a high-quality VPN service launched in 2013. It was initially based in Hungary, which was ideal for VPN users, but recently moved to Gibraltar, which is not as good in our humble opinion. Buffered VPN is best used for streaming in full HD thanks to the exceptional speeds of its servers.
We’ve already crowned Buffered VPN as one of the best services for torrenting, so we’ll now explore its logging policy and the effects of its location on the overall privacy and security of the service.
Legislature
Back in 2006, the EU issued the Data Retention Directive, compelling its member states to record and store electronic communication data between 6 and 24 months. The data collected was used for detecting, investigating, and prosecuting serious crimes.
In 2014, the European Court of Justice invalidated the directive. However, the limitation still stands, mostly because of inharmonious rules at the EU level.
Gibraltar entered the EU in 1973 under the UK, which is in full compliance with the EU Data Retention Directive. Bottom line, Buffered VPN is affected by the EU Data Retention legislation, which is definitely not good news.
The directive remains highly controversial to this day and faces a lot of justified criticism.
Logging Policy
Buffered VPN adheres to its strict no usage logs policy and therefore cannot access user data directly. This means that the company has no way of actually knowing what you’re doing while connected to its servers. Apart from that, they also located their central servers in the Netherland, which used to be a good thing. Nowadays, the Netherlands started introducing some unfavorable pieces of legislation and some citizens believe it’s on its way to becoming a true police state. We’ll just have to wait and see since we can’t really corroborate these claims.
This location, however, means that Buffered VPN is not likely to receive any warrants asking for user data. Even if that happens, though, the company is under no obligation to provide it. We’ll monitor the situation in the Netherlands and keep you up-to-date, but for now, we’ll focus on the fact that the search engine StartPage endorsed by Edward Snowden also keeps its main servers in the Netherlands.