Today is a big day in TunnelBear history. We’ve made the decision for TunnelBear to join McAfee, one of the world’s top cybersecurity companies.

Our team is incredibly proud of our accomplishments over the last 6.5 years. We introduced online privacy to over 22M people around the world, published the VPN industry’s first independent security audit and authored literally tens of thousands of Bear puns. With TunnelBear joining McAfee, you likely have a few questions about what’s changing.

We’re excited to share that TunnelBear will operate as a separate team within McAfee, continuing to develop the bear-filled products you’ve come to know and love. With strong support from McAfee, we’ll continue the fight for our customers’ privacy and be transparent about our privacy and security practices.

TunnelBear will continue to develop the bear-filled products you’ve come to know and love.

For TunnelBear, we know that now is the right time to join forces with McAfee. Our mission has always been to help everyone browse a more private and open internet. Reaching 22M people is an amazing accomplishment, but there’s more than three billion people connected to the internet today and only a tiny percent of these people are using VPN and password managers to protect themselves online. McAfee has the reach to put our services in the hands of hundreds of millions of people and our team is excited to make it happen.

Will TunnelBear stay TunnelBear?

A big part of why McAfee is excited about TunnelBear is our people and the privacy culture we’ve created. So by design, 100% of the TunnelBear team is staying together, and will continue to work on TunnelBear products. Our entire team will continue to be based in Toronto. McAfee is excited for us to continue to grow TunnelBear and we’re excited about their support.

Will TunnelBear keep doing public security audits?

When we published our first public security audit in August 2017, it taught us a lot about what’s required to keep our network secure. TunnelBear and McAfee have both committed to performing security audits annually and publishing the results.

Will TunnelBear’s privacy practices change?

TunnelBear is now part of McAfee, a US based company, which we recognize comes with increased privacy pressure and expectations. Maintaining our customers’ privacy has always been, and will continue to be, our primary concern. We’re confident that we’ve designed a secure network, that will continue to be independently audited. We’ll also continue to collect the minimum amount of data possible to operate our service and document everything in our privacy policy. We know that trust is something that you earn through consistent transparency, so we’ll be sharing updates of our progress as we go.

Our team is excited for the opportunity to spread our Bear-filled apps to an even larger audience. We’d like to thank you for being part of the journey so far, and we look forward to sharing more about our plans in the coming weeks.

Grizzly Regards,

