Just awhile back, we covered a news bit on how PIA exited Russia due to server pressure. A lot of PIA customers were a bit annoyed, and rightly so. However, just recently a Russian website covered a news bit on TorGuard, one of our top rated VPNs.
RNS was informed by TorGuard VPN “that it does not intend to cooperate with the Russian authorities and will not block any websites. “These requests have no legal force in our jurisdiction,” the company explained. TorGuard will continue to offer VPN services in Russia. “For us, this is an ordinary business.”
One reason TorGuard is facing some pressue, and other companies like PIA and many others have in the past is that Russia is cracking down on consumer privacy protection tools like VPNs that use encryption to make data undecipherable.
The reasoning is that the Russian government wants to root out hackers and the like, but more often than not, consumers are just looking for ways to hide their data since it’s their own business.
In the past, Russia has had several shutdowns of social media platforms during protests. During these protests, users turned to VPN tools to unlock websites and encrypt their online activity to stay anonymous.
TorGuard’s blog has even covered their stance on the issue personally. “Unlike some VPN providers, TorGuard will not comply with requests from the Russian government. We won’t be blocking any content on our Russian VPN servers and will continue to offer Russian VPN access with endpoints in Saint Petersburg and Moscow.“
But right now, the Russian State Duma has formally introduced a bill banning VPN uses and the unblocking of websites. This bill requires search engines to cooperate to block access to websites like TorGuard VPN. We’ve seen this implemented in countries like the UK and China where its getting increasingly harder to access VPN websites to encrypt user communications and access blocked content.
