Can Police Track VPN?

How far does the protection of VPN go? Can it apply in all cases, including criminal acts? You are wondering if the police can track VPN whenever you buy something online. Let’s find out the country’s role where a VPN is registered. So can police track VPN?

Police cannot track encrypted and live VPN traffic. But if the police have a court order, they have the authority to go to your internet service provider and order connection or even usage logs. Your internet service provider knows that you are using a VPN; they may direct the police to you.

It depends on factors such as jurisdiction and privacy policies concerning the VPN. It is very important not to ignore privacy policies. A VPN can give some information to the police. But, it depends on what kind of data the VPN provider gathers.

Categories of Data Collection

1. Usage logs include visited websites.
2. Connection logs are records that include users’ real IP address, times of collection, and an IP address that a VPN assigns.
3. Some VPN providers do not keep logs of your VPN activity only except for billing needs and troubleshooting. An example is the surf shark.

VPN and Data Retention Laws

When a country has very strict data retention laws,  a VPN registered in that particular country should keep logs regardless of what they claim on their website.

Take, for instance, if your VPN provider is under the jurisdiction, they cannot claim to be no-logs. For clarity, most VPNs do not monitor your browsing activity, but they might keep connection logs, session information, IP addresses, or even used bandwidth.

Legality Of Using a VPN

Many people wonder if it is illegal to use a VPN. It depends on your country. Many countries allow the use of VPN. But other governments feel the need to restrict the lives of their citizens in most of the aspects. Therefore, VPNs mostly do not slip through the cracks. Examples of countries where VPN is blocked include; Iraq, Belarus, Oman, and Turkmenistan. Others use VPN as restricted, including China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, among others.

Tracking VPN differs when it comes to nations that have restricted its usage. In some areas, you cannot download a VPN or connect to it. In such cases, obfuscated servers can be of great help. They work like an invisibility cloak for VPN to mask your VPN traffic and make it appear like internet traffic.

Are The Police Able to Track Online Purchases Made With a VPN?

The police cannot track live and encrypted VPN traffic. Therefore, the police and the government agencies who require data concerning the websites you visited must contact your ISP or VPN provider whether your VPN provider gives out any data or not, depending on factors like the country retention laws.

Unless they have a strong reason to believe that you are doing something against the law, the police are not even concerned about what you purchase online. Of course, when you use the Tor browser, it can be suspicious to your internet service provider and even the police. But you can be assured that you will not get in trouble simply because it appears to be suspicious.

Note that if a user is involved in any criminal activity, VPN won’t save them. This is because the federal authorities and the police have tactics to capture the perpetrator rather than asking their VPN provider for connection or usage logs.

Takeaway on Police Tracking VPN

The police can only track VPN if the court has ordered them. Being anonymous and untraceable online is near to impossible. VPN is a kind of weapon that will guarantee you more privacy by minimizing commercial adverts, hacking attempts, and masking your IP address. A VPN won’t hide you from legal troubles, and you should not use it as a way to exercise such.

How VPN Works?

Firstly, a VPN is not a magical invisibility cloak to throw over your router. It helps you get online as well as keeping your virtual whereabouts to yourself. Your VPN will stand between you and the world wide web and allow you to access it securely. All you need to practice is to install a VPN client on your PC. This will encrypt your traffic and route it through a safe tunnel.

The host will now respond to you, and the VPN server encrypts it, routed in the same safe tunnel that your VPN client decrypted and revealed to you. That is the basic principle of VPN.

Can VPN Get Detected?

Typically, when not using a VPN, your ISP will play the role of the VPN client, VPN server, and secure tunnel. So simply, everything you will send towards your service of choice must get through your internet service provider’s infrastructure.

If you rely on a VPN to secure your traffic, your internet service provider will not be yanked out. It oversees the whole process instead, though without the knowledge of what is happening.

Your internet service provider can detect if you are using a VPN or not. Passing encrypted traffic is enough of an indicator. Your internet service provider can block your VPN though it will take much time because it involves manual blocking of IPs and ports associated with VPN

How to Use VPN Without Detection?

As I mentioned earlier, even though your internet service provider by any chance detects usage of VPN, you can’t do anything about it. Unless you reside in a country where using VPN is illegal, and they let the police know.

You can look for VPNs that cannot be detected. They provide obfuscated servers that make VPN encrypted traffic look like normal traffic.

Conclusion

VPNs cannot be detected, but even if that happens, it is not a big deal. There are ways to hide VPN detection, like switching off IP addresses, forwarding  VPN traffic to a common port, and changing the port from within the VPN client.