When Ryan Dochuk was naming the Toronto-based tech start-up he helped found two years ago, the exercise involved both practicality and whimsy.

His company, TunnelBear Inc., aimed to bring the benefits of the technology known as Virtual Private Networks to those concerned about advertisers or other organizations tracking them online and who wished to browse the Internet with greater privacy.

In the security world, “tunnelling” is the exercise of getting past surveillance or censorship by encrypting data and making it unreadable when it leaves computers or mobile devices.

And bears? Well, “everybody loves bears,” laughed the 31-year-old native of Courtice, Ont.

What Dochuk and his colleagues at TunnelBear didn’t expect was how many people in Turkey would come to love theirs.

Shortly after the turbulence that began as a small protest flared into more furious discontent across Turkey, TunnelBear “noticed an increased amount of traffic on our network,” Dochuk told the Star.

“We saw it was coming from Turkey and really didn’t know what was going on. We checked local news sources but there didn’t seem to be any reason why this would be happening.”

In short order, through contacts via Twitter and email, Dochuk said his eight-person firm learned that a peaceful process “had gone wrong” and that the Turkish government “was really cracking down in a violent way.”

“It looked like Facebook and Twitter and other social-media sites that protesters were using to organize themselves were effectively being blocked by the government,” he said.

Historically, VPN applications had been too cumbersome and complicated for average users, but TunnelBear’s app is “a much simpler, much easier-to-use product than other applications that are out there.”

The Turkish protesters had been using the free version of the app to access social media, Dochuk said, but were reaching the limit on data transmission.

“They asked us for help in terms of making it more broadly available.”

TunnelBear first wanted to learn more about the situation to decide if this was a “group of people we wanted to help,” he said. “I certainly wasn’t aware of the social-political landscape of things that were going down in Istanbul and in Turkey.”

But TunnelBear quickly decided “to try to do our best to help.”

“Overnight, we kind of whipped up a solution where the users who were coming from Turkey would be automatically granted unlimited data use of PC, Mac Android and iOS applications,” he said.

“We launched that Saturday morning and essentially a huge flood of users continued coming from Turkey,” he said. “This is the first time we’ve really seen (the app) used for explicit concern about surveillance and censorship.”

Dochuk, who studied at the universities of Toronto, Waterloo and Ryerson and has worked in software for about a decade, said it’s been difficult for the small company, which has about a million users, mostly of its free version.

“Providing this much dedicated unlimited data to essentially an entire country of people is costing us money in terms of bandwidth on a daily basis.”

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But the cause — even if it was not precisely what the firm had in mind in developing its app — seemed perfectly suited to the company ethos.

“We think the Internet is a much better place when everyone can browse privately, and browse the same Internet as everyone else,” TunnelBear says.

In Turkey, they seem to agree.