VPNs with servers in Slovakia

Under § 112(2) of Act No. 452/2021 an undertaking must retain traffic data, location data and data of the communicating parties that are covered by a court’s consent under § 117 or a court order under the Criminal Procedure Code. Under § 117(6) a provider of publicly available services must give law-enforcement authorities all such data it has.

Other state authorities need a judge’s written consent, whose term a new request may extend by at most six months each time. In urgent cases of state defence or security, data may be given first, but unless the judge consents within 24 hours the information must be destroyed. Whether these duties reach a VPN operator is not established.

Under § 85 of the Gambling Act (No. 30/2019) the regulator keeps a list of websites and mobile applications offering internet games without an individual licence. A provider of electronic communications networks or services must block access to a listed site (§ 85(12)), and a payment service provider must stop payments to a listed account.

The Act’s definition of a prohibited offer includes urging the use of tools that get around geographic blocking or an access provider’s blocks.

The Criminal Code punishes publicly defaming a nation, language, race or ethnic group, or a group or individual for real or supposed race, nationality, origin, colour or religion (§ 423, one to three years), and public incitement to violence or hatred against such a group, or to restriction of its rights (§ 424, up to three years, two to six in aggravated cases). Distributing extremist material (§ 422b) carries one to five years.

According to the news agency TASR, in May 2024 the Constitutional Court ordered the Slovak Information Service (SIS) to destroy the results of a wiretapping operation of the mid-2000s concerning one complainant, whose fundamental rights it found infringed by the service’s failure to destroy them. According to the same report, the European Court of Human Rights had found a violation of that complainant’s right to privacy in 2021.

The order of the rows is the security score, and a server’s location is not a recommendation.