One of the major Swedish ISPs decided to take an innovative approach to protect its subscribers’ privacy. After facing a legal requirement to log all activities of its customers, the Internet service provider Bahnhof will provide everyone a free, no-logging VPN service.

A few months ago, a EU landmark court ruling declared the Data Retention Directive invalid due to violation of privacy. The Directive required ISPs and other telcos to log data on the activities of their customers – for example, who they communicate with and when, and other identifying data like IP addresses.

Swedish ISP Bahnhof was one of the first to react to this move. The broadband provider is known as the company that objects to breaches of customer privacy, so it didn’t hesitate following the court’s ruling and stopping all data storage immediately. It also announced it would erase the information collected previously.

Nevertheless, in late October, Swedish telecoms regulator ordered the ISP to start collecting communication data again, referring to the local data retention legislation. The regulator threatened the ISP with hefty fines for that non-compliance. At the time, the ISP claimed it has a “Plan B” to skirt the order, and now we know what it was.

In one week, the local regulator will require a fine of about $676,500 from the ISP, because it has not yet begun to collect the customer traffic information. Therefore, Bahnhof has decided to activate “Plan B”. The Internet service provider will reactivate data storage on November 24 as required, but it will also thwart the collection of the required data by providing every Internet user with access to an anonymizing VPN service absolutely for free.

According to the EU Court of Justice, it is a human right for people not to have their communication data stored, so the ISP decided that it’s time for VPN services to become widely used. It offers the service called LEX Integrity – since it is a no-logging provider, it will be impossible for anyone to get any useful data about its users.

After the EU Court of Justice has issued a decision that the previous government chose to ignore, and the current government has been silent about, the ISP decided to resolve the situation by addressing the core problem. It will start to collect data, while making data storage meaningless.