87% of VPN privacy policies are too complex for the average American – and that’s a problem

87% of VPN privacy policies are too complex for the average American – and that’s a problem

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/vpns/87-percent-of-vpn-privacy-policies-are-too-complex-for-the-average-american-and-thats-a-problem

Publish Date: 2026-03-17 07:00:00

Source Domain: www.tomsguide.com

Let’s face it, nobody likes reading privacy policies. It’s about as far from a “fun” activity as you can get. But they contain important information about your personal data and how it’s used by websites, companies, apps, and services.

For privacy tools like the best VPNs, these policies are doubly important. They detail how a VPN company protects your data, what it does and doesn’t collect, and how it upholds its no-logs policy – if it has one.

But how many VPNs actually make these policies clear and easy to read? Unfortunately, the answer is not many.

Tom’s Guide analyzed the privacy policies of some of the biggest names in the VPN industry and found that 87.5% were above the reading age of the average American. The number of sentences varied dramatically, and numerous VPNs had privacy policies with a significant number of sentences deemed “hard to read.”

This is a problem, as it means millions of people are at a disadvantage when it comes to fully understanding how their data is used. Complex privacy policies can also put people off reading them entirely.

At Tom’s Guide, we encourage people to read and understand all types of privacy policies, especially those of VPNs. So, let’s examine a bunch of VPN privacy policies and see which are the most readable.

Key stats at a glance

• Only 12.5% of VPN privacy policies analyzed were written accessibly for the average American
• 40.6% of sentences in the average VPN privacy policy were hard to read
• VPN privacy policies had an average of 195 sentences
• The average VPN privacy policy contained 51.4 “very hard to read” sentences
• The average VPN privacy policy contained 30.1 “hard to read” sentences
• The shortest VPN privacy policy had 19 sentences
• The longest VPN privacy policy had 422 sentences
• The privacy policies of Windscribe, TunnelBear, and AmneziaVPN were the easiest to read
• The privacy policies of CyberGhost and IPVanish were the hardest to read
• Surfshark was the only VPN to provide a summary of the information at the start…

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