A coalition of some of the biggest names in the VPN industry has just announced a new joint initiative aimed at fostering consumer trust and improving standards within the industry.
The VPN Trust Initiative (VTI) is an industry-led and member-driven consortium of VPN business leaders focused on improving digital safety for consumers by building understanding, strengthening trust, and mitigating risk for VPN users.
The VTI hopes to achieve these aims by:
- Defining VPN best practices
- Designing and reinforcing industry standards
- Providing accurate information to government officials and policymakers
- Promoting appropriate industry-led regulations
- Informing the wider technology industry
This is a very welcome development in an industry that is often compared to the Wild West for its shambolic and often lawless state. And the fact that such big names in an increasingly competitive market space have joined the new Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) bodes well for the success of the project.
The founding members of the i2Coalition are NordVPN, Golden Frog (VyprVPN), ExpressVPN, Surfshark and NetProtect (encrypt.me, WLVPN, SugarSync, IPVanish, StrongVPN, OverPlay, SaferVPN).
This is a great start, although we do hope the i2Coalition will prove to be an inclusive one that embraces and engages all legitimate members of the VPN industry - small and large.
If it can do this, then ProPrivacy is very excited about its potential to legitimize a growing and increasingly important industry, improve standards within the industry, and assure a guaranteed standard of service to consumers.
Update: 02/24/20
hide.me is the latest provider to lend its expertise to The Internet Infrastructure Coalition and its VPN Trust Initiative (VTI). This move gels well with hide.me's stance on privacy and security, being a no-logs VPN service with strong encryption and plenty of features for users to sink their teeth into.
Educating users about online security and privacy is one of the biggest challenges our industry faces. This is why we’re very pleased to be aligning ourselves with i2Coalition as we share the common goal of making people aware of online threats and helping them understand how to mitigate against these. The reason I created hide.me is because I truly believe that privacy online isn’t just a privilege - it’s a basic human right for every single person on the planet. Joining forces with the i2Coalition and VTI is a major step forward for the industry as a whole.
Update: 05/18/20
Ivacy is the latest provider to join the growing coalition. Ivacy has quickly grown to become an established provider and lends further weight to this industry-first initiative
A VPN by definition is establishing trust with the user. We believe the internet is meant to be free, but not without proper security to ensure users are not in way over their heads. For this reason, and others, we work closely with organizations that believe in our goals, and it should really not come as a surprise that this is the exact same reason why we want to join the i2Coalitiion and VPN Trust Initiative.