Proton VPN is on the front line of the fight for online freedom and privacy, often battling nation states to enable free access to information.
Recently, there have been increased attempts by authoritarian governments to block our services — but your insights can help us stay one step ahead of the censors.
By sharing anonymous statistics and crash reports from your device with the Proton VPN team, you can help us get around VPN blocks, improve our encryption technology, and continue to provide online freedom and privacy to the global community.
What are usage statistics?
Usage statistics are anonymized data points that help our researchers and scientists understand how Proton VPN interacts with your device, internet service providers (ISPs), firewalls, and other censorship systems.
Usage statistic sharing is enabled by default, but you can disable it at any time (as described below). This data does not contain any personal information and is permanently deleted after 30 days.
Why share usage statistics?
It helps us overcome government censorship
The sooner we can identify censorship, the sooner we can get around it.
Usage statistics and crash reports alert us to potential VPN blocks, firewalls, and other censorship systems by exposing the resulting clusters of connection issues in real time.
The need for on-the-ground information became especially clear during the recent unrest in Iran, where there have been increasingly severe attempts to prevent citizens from using Proton VPN to access outside information.
Usage statistics help us stay one step ahead of the censors and ensure that everyone has uninterrupted access to uncensored news and social media.
Our anti-censorship efforts benefit the entire Proton community. Learning how to overcome deliberate network restrictions also helps us improve VPN performance in other challenging conditions.
It helps us improve our apps
Millions of activists, journalists, and ordinary people around the world trust Proton VPN to help them browse safely, access independent news, and express themselves online.
To meet the needs of the Proton community, we need a better understanding of how our services are used in the real world, what threats they face, and what challenges we need to overcome to build a better, safer internet.
Usage statistics can show our engineers which bugs need to be fixed and alert them to system outages that are otherwise difficult to track down because they impact only a small number of our community members.
They also help our experience team tackle design issues and update outdated information, as well as showing our product team where the Proton VPN experience can be improved with new features.
What statistics are shared?
Some examples include:
Crash reports
We use these to identify and solve bugs, improving the stability of our apps.
Failed connection attempts
We use these to assess how different VPN protocols and ports are performing so we can tackle the root causes of connection issues.
Internet service provider (ISP) and network type
By understanding how censorship restrictions are applied across different providers and networks, we can fine-tune our Smart Protocol and our Stealth Protocol and get better at bypassing VPN blocks.
We look at aggregated statistics to find unusual usage patterns and to identify areas for potential improvement. Statistics are always aggregated and anonymized, allowing us to look at the overall picture — not individual behavior.
You can find more information in our Privacy Policy.
You can also read about the usage statistics shared with other Proton apps.
Your privacy comes first
We’re committed to respecting your online security and privacy. Sharing usage statistics will always be:
- Anonymous: Usage data does not contain your IP address and can’t be used to identify you.
- Limited in scope: Usage data can’t be used to track the websites you visit or your activity in any other apps. It does not change or alter our no-logs policy.
- Optional: You can disable anonymous usage statistics sharing at any time.
- Temporary: Usage statistics are permanently deleted after 30 days.
How do I stop sharing anonymous usage statistics?
You can stop sharing anonymous usage statistics with Proton VPN at any time from inside most of our VPN apps.
macOS
1. Go to Preferences → Advanced
2. Turn off Share anonymous usage data
Android/iPhone/iPad
1. Tap Settings → Usage statistics.
2. Turn off Share anonymous usage data
You can also turn off usage statistic sharing for all Proton services by taking the following steps. (This will also disable usage statistic sharing on the Proton VPN Windows app.)
1. Sign in to your Proton Account on our web app.
2. Select Settings → All Settings → Security and privacy → Privacy and data collection.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and turn off the Collect usage diagnostics toggle. By turning this switch off, you will stop sharing your usage statistics from all Proton services.
Note: The Proton VPN app has app-level controls. If you don’t want to share usage statistics from Proton VPN, you can turn off Usage statistics in the Proton VPN app without affecting another service.
However, you cannot share usage statistics from Proton VPN unless you have enabled Collect usage diagnostics in your Proton Account.
