Are VPNs legal in Italy? The law, and the Piracy Shield record that made people ask

The previous version of this page said Italian internet providers store your search history for six years, cited a 112% pandemic spike in VPN use and put Italian VPN adoption at 11% free and 9% paid. The retention claim was wrong in an important way, the data kept is traffic records, not search history, and the usage figures traced back to surveys I could not verify. None of them survive into this version.

What people actually bring to this page is one question in a few forms: are VPNs legal in Italy, sometimes in Italy or Spain. The short answer is yes, in both. The longer answer is worth a page, because Italy has built the most aggressive site-blocking machine in Europe, is the only EU country whose law names VPN providers as blocking addressees in a standing administrative system, and has started fining viewers. Below are the rules with their statutes, and the full record of what Piracy Shield has actually done, each row with a source.

Are VPNs legal in Italy?

Yes. Using a VPN is legal in Italy, selling one is legal, and no Italian statute places any duty on the person using one. I searched the anti-piracy law, the Privacy Code's retention rules, the copyright statute, the gambling rules and the age-verification rules. Every obligation lands on a provider, a platform or an infringer. Here is where each rule actually sits.

Read down the ten rows and the pattern is plain. Not one of them makes the person using a VPN do anything or risk anything. The two rules that reach individuals at all, the IPTV fines and the age checks, are about conduct and content, and apply identically with or without a VPN. Where Italy stands alone is the second row: using a VPN is legal in Italy, and what Italian law does, uniquely in Europe, is conscript the VPN providers themselves into its blocking system, placing duties on the tool rather than the person holding it.

What has Piracy Shield actually done since 2023?

Piracy Shield is the automated platform through which rights holders feed IP addresses and domains to AGCOM, and providers must block them within 30 minutes. The chronology below is the record I could document, including the misfires, because the misfires are what made ordinary Italians ask about VPNs.

Three things stand out from those 14 rows. First, the two biggest incidents were self-inflicted: a shared Cloudflare address in the platform's first month, and Google Drive for a whole evening in October 2024, both blocked inside Italian access networks while anyone whose traffic left the country through a VPN tunnel never noticed. That asymmetry, not piracy, is what pushed the question "are VPNs legal in Italy" into search engines. Second, the enforcement that has actually landed on infrastructure companies so far is about DNS, Google ordered to filter and Cloudflare fined 14.2 million euros, while I found no published AGCOM measure served on a consumer VPN provider as of September 25, 2026. The one VPN casualty, AirVPN, left the Italian market by its own decision. Third, Italy is the only European country that has moved down the chain to viewers, with about 2,282 fines in spring 2025 and civil claims following. A VPN is legal in Italy, and it is no defence to any of that: the fine attaches to the watching, however routed.

Does the Italian state watch internet users?

Two files matter here, retention and spyware. On retention, Italy is an outlier by duration: the Privacy Code's baseline of 24 months for telephone and 12 for internet traffic data is stretched by Article 24 of Law 167/2017 to 72 months for serious-crime investigations, a six-year window the Italian data protection authority itself has criticised as out of line with EU case law. Since providers cannot know in advance which investigations will come, they keep everything for the longest period. The counterweight arrived in 2021, when Decree-Law 132/2021 required a judge's reasoned decree before prosecutors can pull the records, Italy's answer to the EU Court of Justice's H.K. ruling. What sits in those records is who connected to what, when and from where, not the content. A VPN reduces that record to a single visible counterpart, the VPN server; our table of retention laws in 16 jurisdictions shows where 72 months sits internationally, which is near the top.

On spyware, the record is now official. In January 2025 WhatsApp notified about 90 users, among them Italian journalists and activists, that they had been targeted with Graphite, sold by the Israeli firm Paragon. Citizen Lab confirmed infections forensically in June 2025 and identified journalist Ciro Pellegrino of Fanpage.it among those targeted, months after his editor Francesco Cancellato had received the first notification. On June 5, 2025 the parliamentary intelligence committee COPASIR confirmed that Italian intelligence services had used Graphite against migration-rescue activists, and Paragon terminated its Italian contract after the government declined a technical audit in the journalist's case. In March 2026, Italian prosecutors confirmed the hack. A VPN is the wrong tool against device-level spyware, it protects the path, not a compromised phone, and honesty about that boundary matters more than a sales pitch. What the episode changed is the baseline assumption Italians bring to their devices, and it did more for privacy awareness than any statistic.

How does Italy compare with Spain and France?

Italy wrote its providers into a standing administrative machine; Spain runs blocking through commercial courts, and a Cordoba court's interim order against two VPN providers remains a one-off that the same court declined to enforce with fines; France has had courts order five VPN providers to block sports piracy domains since May 2025. The full comparisons are in our Spain legality and blocking reference and the register of website blocking in France. The practical difference for a user in Italy is that overblocking incidents arrive faster and wider here, because a 30-minute automated pipeline has no time for the checks a courtroom forces. For the everyday side, our VPN for Italy page covers use at home and abroad. Le VPN has a server location in Italy among servers in more than 100 locations, allows 10 simultaneous connections and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

What changes next?

• Cloudflare's second appeal. After the Lazio court's July 17, 2026 judgment upheld the 14.2 million euro fine, Cloudflare said it would appeal to the Council of State. No hearing date was public when this page was updated.
• VPN-provider enforcement. The addressee rules have never been tested against a consumer VPN provider in a published measure. The Cloudflare precedent, if it survives appeal, is the template AGCOM would use.
• Viewer fines, round two. The Guardia di Finanza said investigations were continuing beyond the first 2,282 notified users, and DAZN's civil claims are running in parallel.
• The age-verification list. AGCOM's initial list named 45 adult sites. Expansion of the list, and the first non-compliance decisions, are the file to watch through 2027.
• Retention reform. The 72-month rule has been criticised since 2017 and remains in force. Nothing pending in Parliament would shorten it.