Swedes have begun to register for a free service from ISP Bahnhof to conceal their Internet communications metadata from law enforcement, as well as the CEO of the firm is encouraging other European ISPs to follow suit.

The Swedish ISP will begin offering a free VPN (virtual private network) service to its customers on Monday. That it will likewise restart keeping traffic metadata and customer place for law enforcement purposes to comply with Swedish law, something it ceased doing in May. By complying with the data retention rules, the ISP will prevent about, or a fine of 5 million Swedish Kronor US$678,000.

“It’s an option. It enables customers to select whether they need data retention or not,” he said.

The court invalidated the Data Retention Directive of the EU as it severely hindered with fundamental privacy rights. Swedish data retention law relies on such an directive as well as the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS) enabled ISPs to cease gathering and delete the information without effect after the opinion.

Nevertheless, in August the PTS ordered ISPs to begin keeping information again and made a 180 degree turn.

The traffic will not be encrypted by the service and is just intended to conceal the identity of someone’s, Karlung said. “It functions as a laundry machine. It removes all information about who has done what on the Web,” he said. The servers of the foundation are found close to Bahnhof’s, so network speeds must not be changed, based on Karlung.

Oscar Swartz, chairman of the foundation said Bahnhof does not have any accessibility to the machines of the foundation. “They don’t have any means of understanding what their clients are doing after giving them over to our servers,” he said.

They share IP addresses, meaning many users can possess the exact same address in exactly the same time, when Bahnhof customers browse using the VPN. “As a supplier of the service we would not have to keep information. Even if we’d have to, there would be no valuable info to be had from us,” Swartz said.

From a legal standpoint, the VPN service may be deemed to be run by Bahnhof, said legal adviser in the PTS, Steffan Lindmark. Right now, the PTS cannot rule this possibility out since the authority has not yet looked into the issue.

Nevertheless, there are not any plans. And as long as Bahnhof begins keeping information on Monday, all ought to be good.

Karlung believes that European consumers should put pressure on their ISPs to offer such a service, and European ISPs should follow the example of Bahnhof.