When we started TunnelBear in 2011, we set out to build an easy-to-use product that respects people’s privacy. Seven years later, we continue to operate our company without having to collect much personal data.

When you connect to TunnelBear, you’re trusting us to not keep a record of four things. We understand these to be: when you connected to TunnelBear, where you connected from, what IP you connected to and what you did while you were connected to TunnelBear. These items are the pieces of information that the VPN industry commonly refers to when they say “no logging”.

you’re trusting us to not keep a record of. . .what you did while you were connected to TunnelBear.

Skepticism from customers, and privacy advocates, has grown over the last few years as VPN providers, despite claiming not to be logging, have been found selling data to advertisers and turning over user data to authorities. At TunnelBear, we’re constantly looking for ways to help customers see how the claims that we do not log can be proven to be more than just marketing.

New tools let you download your data

On May 25th 2018, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation came into force and brought with it strengthened privacy rights for residents of the European Economic Area. At TunnelBear, we find the most exciting part to be the rights to access, update, delete and export your data. While these rights – except the right to opt out of marketing – are not absolute, we’ve been busy trying to figure out how we can use these regulations to better serve our customers.

Today, we’re excited to announce TunnelBear’s new privacy management tools to support our privacy policy update. The combination gives anyone who uses TunnelBear, around the world, the ability to manage the little bit of data we store.

Our privacy policy updates

Our Privacy Policy provides visibility and context into the data that TunnelBear stores, the control that you have and how we work with third-party vendors. A brief summary of the changes are below, but please check out the Privacy Policy for additional context.

Section Updates
1.3 - Operational Data Added an explanation of "operational events"; events which help us debug account and payment related issues. These events aren’t tied to your VPN usage.
1.5 - Cookies Added an explanation of why we need the cookies we use
2.2 - Third-Party data Provided additional insight into our relationships with companies that provide us with services like: payment processing, customer support tools and email delivery
2.3 - Consent and Legitimate Interest Updated to explain our lawful grounds for communicating with you
2.10 - EU data transfer Calls out for EU residents that we transfer personal data to our data center in Canada
2.11 - Rights of Access, Rectification, Erasure, and Restriction Added that active TunnelBear users can download, update and delete any Personal Data we store

See the changes in action: TunnelBear Privacy Center

At TunnelBear, we’ve always tried to find new ways to show you how little we actually know about you. With the launch of TunnelBear’s Privacy Center, anyone who uses our service can now see and manage the data we collect at TunnelBear. You can login to your account and manage your privacy with these options:

  • Get a download of all the data we store
  • Request to update or change any of your data that you feel to be inaccurate
  • Delete your account and any associated data.

Try it today by visiting TunnelBear’s Privacy Center.

New privacy protections for anyone who uses TunnelBear

It’s only natural to have questions about how a company handles your personal information, especially when talking about the VPN industry. Since we started in 2011, TunnelBear has always been committed to protecting our customers' privacy and we feel that this level of transparency is an important next step for the industry.

TunnelBear has always been committed to protecting our customers' privacy

We’re excited for you to download your data and see exactly what we know about you. You’ll see that there are no records that can tell us when you connected to TunnelBear or what you did while you were connected. We consider this to be personal and we do not keep a record of it.

If you have any questions about your data, how TunnelBear is complying the GDPR or any of our privacy practices, please contact our friendly Support Bears.

Grizzly regards,
the TunnelBear Team