Last updated: February 13, 2026
Outline is developed and maintained by the Outline Foundation, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting people's ability to participate in the open internet. Our mission is rooted in the belief that privacy is a fundamental human right.
This Privacy Policy explains the information Outline collects, how it’s used, and why we’ve designed our systems to collect as little data as possible.
Our guiding principles are:
Outline is not a VPN service provider. We provide software that enables you to create and operate your own private VPN server. This means:
Because of this design, we are unable to see, log, or store your browsing history, the content of your communications, your IP address, or your DNS queries.
The Outline Foundation does not collect any of the following user data:
We collect a very limited amount of technical information to maintain and improve the Outline software.
When your Outline Server checks for software updates, its IP address is visible to the container registry we use to distribute those updates (currently Quay.io). This information may indicate the cloud provider and region of your server, but it is not connected to your personal identity. This is used solely to deliver software updates.
If an Outline Manager or Client application crashes, it automatically sends a diagnostic report to our error-reporting service. This is not optional, as these reports are essential for us to identify and fix bugs. To help distinguish between reports, these may include a randomly generated, anonymous client ID.
These reports contain technical information such as:
These reports do not include your IP address or any of your personal data or online activity.
You can choose to share anonymous usage metrics to help us improve Outline. This is disabled by default.
If you opt-in, your server will send us hourly, aggregated data tied to a randomly generated server ID. This data includes, on a per-access-key basis:
This data is used to understand usage trends and improve the product. It is never tied to you or your devices. You can enable or disable sharing at any time in the Outline Manager.
The Outline applications allow you to voluntarily submit feedback. If you do, we will collect the same technical information included in a crash report, as described above. We also give you the option to provide your email address if you would like a direct response.
We use industry-standard security measures to protect the limited data we collect.
Optional usage metrics are aggregated to the country and ISP level after 60 days to further anonymize the data. We retain other technical data only as long as necessary to maintain and improve the software.
Trust is built on verification. Outline’s code is open source and has been subjected to multiple independent security audits. You can review their full reports on our website.
We use a small number of third-party services to operate Outline:
We have chosen these services because of their strong privacy and security practices. They are governed by their own privacy policies.
Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have certain rights regarding your personal information. Because we collect very little data, these rights are limited to the technical data described in this policy.
We are committed to respecting your rights, which include:
To exercise any of these rights, please contact us at privacy@getoutline.org. We will respond to your request in accordance with applicable laws.
You also always have the right to inspect our open-source code and review our independent security audits to verify our practices.
We may update this policy from time to time. We will post any changes on our website and update the "Last updated" date.
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at privacy@getoutline.org.