Choose the best VPN for Norway

Norway has been a champion of privacy and freedom, and this also reflected online. But things aren’t as rosy as they seem.

Norway is part of the Nine Eyes surveillance alliance. The alliance also features intelligence services from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands. These countries freely collaborate to collect and share surveillance data.

The nations involved can always request data and store it, even if it was deleted in Norway.

This becomes more worrying when you consider the fact that in Norway, Internet Service Providers are obligated to keep activity logs on users for six months. There is no guaranteed that your data isn’t stored somewhere else by the other 9 Eyes members.

Norway has always been a fierce protector of copyrighted material. Which is great news for creators, but bad news for torrent lovers.

In 2015, a Norwegian court ruled to ban seven torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay. ISPs had to make sure they were unreachable.

Norwegian ISPs have also been known to throttle P2P traffic, which disrupts the connection to software such as BitTorrent.

Illegal torrenting has also been the cause for one of the harshest sentences in Norway. A powerful trio encompassing Warner, Universal, and Disney took the unnamed owner of a pirating site, NorskiFilm.net, to court. The individual was charged with copyright infringement offenses related to more than 1,200 films and television episodes. He was also convicted to six months of prison time and received a fine of NOK 250,000. This was only a small part of what the media companies were proposing: NOK 823,062.

To date, this is considered the harshest sentence for copyright infringement in Scandinavia. It comes as no surprise that anti-piracy efforts have shown results. With penalties such as these, it’s hard to go about pirating with no protection and no encryption.