A Primer on Internet Privacy
AVPN.org is an anonymous internet service. It enables you to use the same internet provider you currently have and at the same time you remain anonymous in all your internet activities. When you have our service connected all your internet traffic goes through one of our servers. Your internet traffic is encrypted before it leaves your computer making it impossible for even your isp to "spy" on you. We have servers strategically located in different places around the world. Whenever you do anything on the internet your true IP address is passed on to the other party involved in the transaction. With us whenever you visit a website, send email, chat, ICQ, AIM, IRC, FTP, Peer to Peer, make internet phone calls etc., your real IP address is not provided to the other people involved in the transaction. This is a tremendous preventive measure against hacking. Most hacking is based on using your real IP address, which the hacker won't be able to get, without that they have no idea where to hack into.
Your internet provider retains a log file that shows the times your IP address was used and where it connected to. Some internet providers save these log files indefinitely and they may give these files to whoever asks with or without a court order and this would mean every website you visited and everything you did is no longer private. Your internet provider has your home address, name, phone, credit card etc. When this information is turned over to third parties your privacy has been violated big time and you don't even know it. The results of this can be stalking electronically or physically, identity theft, and other forms of harassment.
WARNING
Do not be deceived into thinking Downloading only software, sites, etc for movies, music etc. will exempt you from lawsuits. This is not the case. In the past the lawsuits have mostly involved those doing uploading. One can still be sued for downloading copy protected material. In the eyes of the court uploading or downloading copy protected property is the same. If one was to hypothetically download copy protected material and the site or uploader had the real IP address of the downloader the downloader and uploader could be in for a lawsuit. Don't be deceived by false arguments.
What happens if you use our service?
When you connect to our service all internet traffic is encrypted and then goes through one of our servers. This means all your own internet provider could tell was that you constantly stay connected to our servers. What you did after you connected to our server is not transparent to them; they have no way of knowing. All internet activities while using the service will show our IP address only so no one has your true IP address. We keep logs for only 5 days, so there is no permenant record of your activity no matter who wants to know. Since we do not store logs related to our customer's internet activity, we have nothing to produce even we are requested to do so.
There is a frequently traveled road for abuse in the court system. An attorney suspects his client has been damaged by someone. The attorney has no idea who this person is. The attorney files a John Doe lawsuit with the court which means they are suing someone but do not yet know who it is and this enables them to use the discovery power of the courts to track down the party they are after. Now here is the abuse potential. Every time the lawyer wants to send some internet provider, bank, phone company, credit card company a subpoena they can "lawfully" do so and the person they are after of course has his privacy seriously violated without any knowledge, no attorney to protect their rights, and there is no one in the court system opposing this at all, it simply goes on unchecked. In the vast majority of internet based lawsuits this is the tactic being used. One prominent entity used this process to such a broad extent the courts told them they need to apply to the judge for subpoenas. Another big internet entity used these tactics and if that wasn't enough they would get an ex -parte attachment order against their targets bank account by telling the judge that they felt the culprit was likely to flee with their money when they know the lawsuit is in play so they would post a bond with the court and then have their targets bank account seized by the court, same for houses, cars, etc. all before the party knew they were being sued. So when they got served with the lawsuit they had no money in the bank they could use to hire a lawyer with. You gotta just love those lawyers.
The time required for an attorney to file a lawsuit, and then generate subpoenas usually runs into the months. Subpoenas typically require someone to comply within 10-30 days, depending on the subpoena. If one has no information to provide then the subpoena would be returned with notation that requested information is not in the possession of the entity served with the subpoena. Now if the entity is an offshore (not American) entity like us, how are you going to serve the subpoena and get authority over the company involved, most likely you are not and if you tried you would have to hire lawyers in other countries and try to convince a foreign court to help you. Most countries do not allow games in the courts like America. Only two or three other countries in the world allow lawyers to work on contingency fee agreements. Countries would want to see how their laws were violated and if they had venue and jurisdiction. In a nutshell historically the success rate is so bad and the expense rate so high it is not done. Remember behind the lawyers is a client who has to spend big money to chase people who if they ever find them may have no assets they can attach.
When a big internet entity sues someone their legal expenses are rarely under $300,000 and that is if the other party hardly puts up a fight, when the other side fights back the bills easily exceed $500,000. This is a game only the biggest players can play; they rarely ever recover their legal expenses. Their goal is usually to stop people in general from doing something they don't like by making examples of people. The people they make examples out of are the ones that they can easily get, the ones that did not take any measures to remain anonymous. Did these victims of litigation actually violate any laws, sometimes yes and sometimes no (in our opinion). The big law firms seem to be manufacturing internet law as they go. Some big players have influenced congress to pass legislation in their favor and yes then it becomes illegal. This is not to say that there are not a lot of frivilous harassing lawsuits on the internet because there are. If people can't find you they can't stalk you, hack you or harass you.
Personal Information
We never ask for your physical address or phone number. We also do not require an email address. This is to protect your anonymity. We have your user name, password and payment verification from the payment processor in our files located offshore (not in USA). You can join the service and then create a free web based email account (suggest not in the country you live in) anonymously using the service to open the account and every single time you connect to it and then ask us to use this email address to send you correspondence, notices, news etc. We rarely send out email by the way and never give the email address to another entity. You never have to give us an email address.
For secure extreme privacy we recommend that you disable java scripts and do not let your computer store cookies.
