Surfshark becomes the second major virtual private network (VPN) to shut down its India servers after Express VPN. This comes after a cybersecurity directive by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) made it compulsory for the VPNs to store user data for a period of five years.
“In response to the new Indian data regulation laws, Surfshark is shutting down its servers in India. The new laws require VPN providers to record and keep customers’ logs for 180 days as well as collect and keep excessive customer data for five years,” said Surfshark in a blog post. They added that Surfshark operates under a ‘no logs’ policy and that the CERT-In directive goes against the ‘core ethos of the company.’
— Surfshark (@surfshark) June 7, 2022
Express VPN removed its India servers before Surfshark owing to the same directive that calls for the VPNs to record consumer data like names, email IDs, contact numbers, and IP addresses (among other things) of their customers for a period of five years. Surfshark VPN might not be the last in removing its servers from India as Nord VPN is also looking for a similar move away from the country.
Surfshark has announced that it will shut down all of its physical servers before the new law comes into force on June 27th, 2022. The company will introduce virtual servers for India which will be physically located in Singapore and London. Surfshark has more than 3000 servers in 65 countries as of April 2022.
“Users in India who don’t use Indian servers will not notice any differences – they will still be able to connect to whichever server outside the country they please,” said Surfshark.
“VPN suppliers leaving India isn’t good for its burgeoning IT sector. Surfshark’s data shows that since 2004, the year data breaches became widespread, 14.9B accounts have been leaked and a striking 254.9M of them belong to users from India,” the company added
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