Where the security score comes from
Eight channels, each asking one question of the published record and reading a named set of fields to answer it. They multiply rather than add — the factor beside a channel is what is left after the pressure it found, and open a channel to see every field it read, as it is stored. How the model works
Security fields
67 55 of them feed a channel
Established
41 19 left unknown, 7 not applicable
Completeness
69% the share the model could weigh
Citations
46 across 15 documents
Every value carries what it rests on, and the model weighs the four levels differently. Weight, then how many citations on this record sit at that level:
B weighs 0.85 · 38 hereC weighs 0.70 · 7 hereD weighs 0.35 · 1 here
The weights are methodology.json’s own; a claim seen in the artefact itself counts for more than the same claim reported second-hand. The date at the end of a row is the day that value was last read.
A channel does not price every field it reads. The ones it did are marked along their edge and carry what they added; everything else was read and cost nothing. Only a channel that composes field by field can mark a field at all — the rest price themselves by the parameters printed above their rows.
Still open on this record.
No independent audit. No no-logs audit, infrastructure audit or penetration test of any kind is published or claimed anywhere on PrivateVPN's own site; the no-logs claim rests entirely on the privacy policy's own wording, unchecked by any outside party at any level, and nothing here corroborates it.
Server ownership and architecture are unstated. The site says it buys transit capacity directly from IP providers, which speaks to its network backbone, but never says whether the VPN servers themselves are owned hardware, rented dedicated machines, or virtualised, and never distinguishes physical from virtual exit locations on its 62-country server list.
the rest of what is open — 86 more words
DNS handling, RAM-only status and IP-sharing model are never addressed. No page states whether DNS resolution stays inside the tunnel, whether servers run diskless, or whether an exit IP is shared among users or dedicated — three separate questions the site's marketing pages simply never raise.
No transparency report or warrant canary has ever been published, so nothing here documents how the company has behaved when a real demand arrived; the record's practice fields describe the absence of any public history rather than a demonstrated resistance.
On the record as a whole.
PrivateVPN Global AB was founded in 2009 by Martin Müller and acquired in June 2022 by Miss Group (majority-owned by the UK private-equity firm Perwyn since 2020), a web-hosting and domain-registration conglomerate; Müller left the business at closing and day-to-day management passed to Miss Group's existing Swedish management team.
The acquisition is documented only in Miss Group's own press release and corporate site, not on privatevpn.com itself. U12b_streaming_works is coded 'partial' on a D-level source (the provider's own marketing page naming Netflix and BBC iPlayer) because no independent confirmation of unblocking exists.
RetentionDoes a record exist that links traffic to a person, and who checked?13 fields read · 6 not applicable · 55.0 points of pressure×0.450
Composed rather than added: a prior of 0.55 on the none branch, moved by what the paper says (0.0) and by what the practice shows (0.0), at credence 0.0 from the audit and 0.35 from how the provider engaged, against a severity of 0.03 for what is actually retained.
How the report is published
Computed
×0.146 of a clean record completeness 69%
Where the drop comes from: Retention. It is the channel this record's risk is concentrated in — on its own it takes a clean record to ×0.450, and its bar above is filled to that.
Exposure is recorded as medium and the integrity status as clean.
Against the rest of the register, this record sits furthest above on Integrity — ×0.960 where the register averages ×0.658 — and furthest below on Silence, ×0.745 against ×0.927.
Every row above is one field of the published record, and every one of them can be challenged: every row carries Report, or raise something about the record as a whole. A correction with a source behind it is made the same day, and if it moves the score it moves the rank.
