YOUR PRIVACY WITH TUNNELBEAR
Beyond its cute and powerful bears, TunnelBear’s
greatest strength is its stance on privacy. It has one of
the best privacy policies we have seen, explaining in
great detail and with plain language, exactly what it
collects and why. It also includes discussion sections,
where the company explains how it arrived at a
particular decision. For example, a pull-out section
talks about how the company used to gather users’
names to customize communications but decided that
this information didn’t need to be gathered or stored
and that its loss could put customers at risk. Other VPN
companies should take note of this approach.
Notably, TunnelBear says that it will not disclose, sell,
or trade personal information with third-party
companies. TunnelBear does use third parties for
payment processing, but this is not unusual.
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me that TunnelBear’s only source of revenue is
subscriptions—not data mining or ad retargeting. The
company says it does not collect information about user
activity, nor does it store originating IP addresses,
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For free subscribers, it does record the overall
bandwidth in order to enforce its data cap. This is reset
to zero at the end of each month.
The company is based in Toronto, Canada, and
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company McAfee. Canada and the US do not have
mandatory data retention laws. The company is subject
to requests for data that a company like NordVPN,
based in Panama, may not be. The company says it has
legal teams for responding to requests for information
but, “we have no information that can connect
Beyond its
cute and
powerful
bears,
TunnelBear’s
greatest
strength is its
stance on
privacy.