- Windscribe said Bill C-22 will not change its privacy policies
- The bill would require service providers to store user metadata
- The Senate of Canada will debate Bill C-22 in September
A Reddit user recently posed a direct question to Windscribe: Is paying for a Canada-based VPN a privacy issue, given the surveillance bill working its way through Parliament?
The company’s official support account responded with no cover. Windscribe will continue to operate exactly as it has, the account said, with no changes to our logging or privacy policies.
Canada is introducing laws that really complicate things for the company, Windscribe added, but that’s internal work to fix rather than something subscribers should expect to feel.
It’s a calmer message than the one Windscribe issued in May, when it said it would move its headquarters before starting to log users. That put it alongside Signal and NordVPN and made it one of the sharpest voices among the top VPN providers fighting the bill.
Bill C-22, formally the Legal Access Act, passed the House of Commons on June 18 and now sits in the Senate, which will not begin its inquiry until Parliament returns in September.
Windscribe and Bill C-22: what the VPN provider said
Is paying for Windscribe a privacy issue since they are based in Canada and the likely upcoming Bill C-22? Would love to subscribe if not for this.
from r/Windscribe
Pressed further down the line, Windscribe drew a line between where the company is registered and where its infrastructure resides.
The incoming laws could see it served with a court order requiring it to begin logging users, the support account acknowledged. Its answer is jurisdictional: a virtual private network (VPN) operating outside of Canada does not have to comply with Canadian law.
That mirrors the route the company has signaled since May, when CEO Yegor Sak told the Globe and Mail he was actively exploring moving Windscribe out of the country.
Windscribe was also careful to separate the provider’s obligations from the user’s responsibilities. No law currently prevents Canadians from using a VPN, it pointed out, and the risk it describes only reaches customers if a provider stays put and starts logging traffic.
For anyone uneasy about the paper trail, Windscribe’s proposition was simple: pay in crypto so that neither the government nor a card issuer sees the purchase.
What’s next for Canada Bill C-22
Introduced in March by Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree, Canada Bill C-22 would let the government force electronic service providers to retain user metadata and build technical capabilities for law enforcement access.
The House passed it on third reading on June 18 after the government moved to limit debate, and the Senate is set to take it up on September 21, according to Parliament’s own LEGISinfo tracker.
Late amendments reduced the maximum retention period for metadata from twelve months to six and added a clause that the law cannot be read as compelling decryption unless the provider already has the keys.
However, law professor Robert Diab argues that this does not go far enough, as ministerial orders can still sweep up the metadata of people who are not under any suspicion whatsoever.
The government has consistently rejected the surveillance framework, insisting the bill does not build any back doors and that authorities still need legal authorization to obtain data.
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