Who owns VPN Gate? Company, jurisdiction and related brands

VPN Gate appeared in 2013 as an academic experiment by the University of Tsukuba in Japan. The project's official name is the VPN Gate Academic Experiment Project. The second participant, SoftEther Corporation, develops the open-source SoftEther VPN program, which Windows users connect through. The project states outright that it will never become a paid service, so the site has no plans, currencies, or affiliate program.

Who owns the servers and data

The project runs the website and the shared server list, while the relay nodes themselves are operated by volunteers. The project has no servers of its own. This setup means user data sits in two places. The central connection log, with the client's original IP, session times, and traffic volume, is kept by SoftEther for at least three months. Packet header logs remain on each volunteer server for at least two weeks. There is no separate privacy policy; the rules are collected on the project's abuse page.

What the Japanese jurisdiction means

Japan is not part of the 5/9/14 Eyes alliances. For a VPN Gate user this matters less than it might seem: under the project's rules, connection logs are handed over to the police, prosecutors, and the court on request, and Japanese law allows an injured party to obtain disclosure of the original IP address. The project has no transparency report and no warrant canary, so there is no way to tell from the outside how many such requests there have been. How data laws work in other countries is covered in the VPN jurisdictions section.

Does VPN Gate have related brands?

Our data shows one: SoftEther VPN, an open-source program from softether.org. Our data lists no other VPN brands under the same owners.