Make confident, data-driven decisions with actionable ad spend insights.
© 2026 DataCops. All rights reserved.
9 min read
You run a digital business, so you understand the rising tide of privacy consciousness. Your customers are worried, and they are doing something about it. They're using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and they are using them a lot. The VPN market is soaring, expected to exceed $150 billion by 2029, fueled by cyber-threats and, ironically, data privacy regulations like the GDPR itself.
Orla Gallagher
PPC & Paid Social Expert
Last Updated
December 11, 2025
It is easy to assume that a massive increase in VPN use is just a neat story for security blogs. But here is the cynical truth: the very tools your customers use to protect their privacy are simultaneously breaking your data, muddying your analytics, and creating a compliance mess that most businesses—and most popular analytics platforms—are completely ignoring.
This isn't about the personal privacy that a VPN gives your user. That's a clear win. This is about the collateral damage to your business data integrity and, critically, the gap it exposes in your GDPR compliance framework. If you think your current analytics setup can handle the VPN tsunami, you are deep in a fictional world of clean data and easy answers.
Let us bust the first, most dangerous myth immediately: A consumer using a VPN does not automatically make your business GDPR compliant.
A VPN primarily encrypts the connection between the user's device and the VPN server. It hides the user's real IP address from the websites they visit. That is the service it provides. It is an anonymity tool for the user, not a compliance tool for you, the website owner and Data Controller.
Myth vs. Reality: VPNs and GDPR for the Data Controller
Feature The Common Myth The Reality for Your Business
Anonymity The user is truly anonymous, so GDPR does not apply. The user's IP is masked, but your analytics still collect personal data (PII) like unique identifiers, device information, and geolocation (of the VPN server).
Data Quality VPN traffic is a small, ignorable fraction of data. VPN/Proxy traffic can be over 10% of sessions in some regions, and it actively falsifies the geolocation and user journey data you use for segmentation and optimization.
Compliance Since the IP is hidden, you do not need consent. GDPR applies to any processing of PII. You still collect device IDs, session logs, and other identifiers that are PII. Your obligation to obtain prior, granular consent remains absolutely mandatory.
The key takeaway is that an IP address is only one piece of the Personal Data puzzle. Your systems are still collecting a vast amount of potentially identifiable information—browser fingerprinting data, unique session IDs, user-agent strings, and the geographic location of the VPN endpoint. The latter is often a lie, which is where the mess gets deeper.
The VPN paradox creates two severe and immediate business problems that impact your bottom line directly: Data Integrity and Ad Fraud.
Imagine you run an e-commerce site and rely on geo-segmentation to offer local promotions or target ads. A user in Milan connects to a VPN server in Amsterdam. Your analytics platform dutifully records a session from Amsterdam.
Your Data Story is Now Wrong:
Geo-Segmentation Fails: You waste money showing ads to 'Amsterdam' users who are actually in Milan. Your A/B tests for the Dutch market are contaminated.
Performance Metrics are Skewed: If the Milan user is just browsing, they're now counted as a legitimate but mislocated user in your European data, distorting the conversion rate for that entire regional segment.
Bot/Fraud Detection Blurs: Legitimate users using consumer VPNs are now indistinguishable from malicious traffic using residential proxies and botnets, making it exponentially harder to filter out actual fraud.
"In today's threat landscape, being prepared with multi-layered defenses is crucial," notes a recent analysis by a cybersecurity firm. But how can you build a multi-layered defense when a significant portion of your traffic is deliberately misrepresenting its origin? You can't. You need to identify this traffic first.
This is where the cynical part comes in. A huge volume of traffic masked by VPNs and proxies is not just privacy-conscious individuals; it's bot and fraudulent traffic trying to look legitimate. Since they are hiding their true, known-bad IP, they slip through standard firewall and fraud filters that rely on simple IP blocklists.
You are paying real money for fake data. You send this dirty, obfuscated data—complete with mislocated conversions and bot-driven interactions—to your ad platforms like Meta and Google via their Conversion APIs (CAPI). These platforms then optimize your campaigns based on that garbage input. It's a vicious, expensive cycle of self-sabotage.
The structural problem is that most legacy analytics tools (especially those running via third-party scripts) are not designed to be a Data Controller's enforcement layer. They are data collectors, first and foremost.
Many modern marketers switch to server-side tracking (SST) to gain data stability against ad blockers and ITP. This is a good technical step, but it is a massive legal gamble without the right compliance framework.
When you implement SST, you pull the tracking script from your server, making the browser see it as a first-party request. This recovers lost data, which is great. But in the eyes of GDPR, you just took full, active control over the data stream.
As one industry expert put it, "True data privacy is less about obtaining consent and more about technical enforcement. The legal risk diminishes significantly when you can demonstrate a verifiable, automated process that strips PII and prevents data sharing before the data leaves your controlled environmen1t." This quote highlights the core deficiency of standard SST implementations: they prioritize data recovery over compliance enforcement.
If your server receives the full, raw request—IP, user-agent, headers—and then you fail to verify prior, granular consent before forwarding that data to a third-party ad platform, you are in blatant breach of GDPR. The shift to SST amplifies your responsibility as the Data Controller.
You have a Consent Management Platform (CMP). Great. But how does that consent signal, captured client-side, travel to your server-side tracking setup and enforce itself before the data is processed? Often, it is a messy, easily lost, or misinterpreted signal passed through layers of code (like GTM) that can contradict each other.
If a user denies tracking for "Advertising," but your server-side tool sends the data anyway because it missed the signal, you have a hard-to-prove, hard-to-defend compliance failure. The more independent tracking scripts (pixels) you run, the higher the chance of one of them ignoring the user's clear, stated privacy choice.
This is where you need to move beyond simple technical fixes and embrace an architectural shift that addresses the dual problems of data integrity and consent enforcement simultaneously. This is the core value proposition of DataCops.
The first step is identifying and categorizing the VPN/Proxy traffic that contaminates your analytics. DataCops' first-party analytics system is designed to not only collect the full session data (bypassing ad blockers via CNAME setup) but also to apply sophisticated fraud detection filters before the data is used for optimization or attribution.
We turn a VPN-masked session from a blind-spot into a clean data point.
We identify and categorize the traffic source. This allows you to:
Flag VPN/Proxy Traffic: Know the volume, separate it from legitimate traffic, and understand the true geographical source (where possible).
Send Clean CAPI Data: Only forward clean, human-validated, non-fraudulent conversion events to your ad platforms. This immediately improves ad optimization and reduces wasted ad spend on ghost conversions.
DataCops does not just recover data; it acts as the necessary, TCF-certified, single verified messenger for all your marketing and analytics tools.
A TCF-certified First-Party CMP is built directly into the data collection flow. This is the crucial step that standard server-side setups miss. The user's consent choice is captured and tied directly to the first-party data stream.
This means:
Prior Consent is Hard-Coded: The DataCops server-side logic is physically unable to forward any advertising or non-essential analytics payload to a third-party platform (Google, Meta, etc.) unless the user has provided the explicit, recorded, and verifiable consent.
Single Source of Truth: Unlike GTM, where multiple independent pixels can run wild, DataCops captures the single, complete user journey once. It then selectively sends a clean, minimized Conversion API (CAPI) payload to each platform based on the user's consent and the specific data that platform actually needs.
This coordinated control satisfies the fundamental GDPR principles of Data Minimization and Integrity by ensuring Meta only gets the data Meta needs, and Google only gets the data Google needs, and nothing more. The raw, complete data remains in your controlled first-party analytics system for internal use, while th2e external payloads are strictly sc3rubbed for PII and consent verified.
The VPN market is not a distant trend; it is a structural change in how users interact with your website, and it demands an architectural response to maintain both data quality and legal compliance. Ignoring the issue leads to: Misallocated Ad Spend + Legal Exposure.
Here is your practical, actionable plan to get out of the mess:
Acknowledge the Data Corruption: Accept that 10%+ of your current analytics data is likely contaminated by VPN/Proxy usage, falsifying geolocation, and blurring the line between human and bot traffic.
Audit Your Consent Enforcement: Do not trust a simple client-side CMP. Verify how the user's consent signal is received, verified, and enforced by your server-side tracking before data leaves your domain. If you cannot prove prior, granular enforcement, you are at risk.
Implement First-Party Integrity & Enforcement: Shift to a true first-party analytics solution that runs on your CNAME subdomain. This bypasses the browser/ad-blocker problem while providing the necessary technical control.
You need a solution that gives you complete data and complete compliance. DataCops provides this unified solution: data collection via a first-party CNAME setup for resilience, built-in fraud detection for data integrity, and a TCF-certified First-Party CMP for absolute, verifiable, technical consent enforcement. Stop letting your data tell you lies, and start building an analytics framework you can actually defend in a court of law or a board meeting.
