Using a VPN in Belgium is legal, and the country does not filter political content; Freedom House scores Belgium 95 out of 100 in its 2026 report. The blocks that exist are commercial and legal ones. The Gaming Commission keeps a blacklist of illegal gambling sites, which passed 890 entries in May 2026, and since 15 December 2025 a .be domain offering illegal gambling can have its name servers switched off within one working day under an agreement with DNS Belgium.
Piracy blocking has grown sharply. In 2025 the sports broadcaster DAZN obtained orders requiring not only internet providers but also the public DNS services run by Google, Cloudflare and Cisco to stop resolving about 100 pirate sports sites, on pain of 100,000 euros a day. Cisco withdrew its OpenDNS service from Belgium on 11 April 2025 rather than comply, and returned in July 2025 after a Brussels court suspended the order. On 20 August 2026 the French-speaking commercial court in Brussels ruled that requiring the DNS services to block was an appropriate measure.
Data retention keeps returning to court. The Constitutional Court annulled the 2016 retention law in April 2021. Its replacement, the law of 20 July 2022, requires operators to keep data identifying every user, including IP addresses, and to keep traffic and location data for up to 12 months in areas picked out by crime statistics, at strategic sites and where the terror threat level is high. The Constitutional Court upheld most of it on 26 September 2024 but asked the EU Court of Justice about parts of it, and on 3 September 2026 an Advocate General advised that EU law rules out several of its provisions. The judgment is still to come.
Belgium is also one of the Fourteen Eyes, the wider intelligence-sharing group revealed in the Snowden documents. GhostShield has no server in Belgium; Gravelines, just across the French border, Amsterdam and Paris are the nearest. They protect your connection but cannot give you a Belgian address.
International Privacy Standards
Internet freedom varies significantly by country. Organizations like Freedom House track global internet freedom annually, while the EU's GDPR has set new standards for data protection worldwide. Reporters Without Borders monitors press freedom and digital access restrictions globally.
A VPN helps you maintain consistent privacy protections regardless of which country you're browsing from, ensuring your data stays encrypted and your activity stays private.
The privacy landscape in Belgium
The state's reach is legal and visible: data retention, court-ordered blocking and intelligence cooperation within the Fourteen Eyes. The Advocate General's opinion of September 2026 is a reminder that the retention rules may change again.
A VPN keeps your browsing away from your provider and from anyone on the same network, and with it on the provider's records show a connection to the VPN server. It is not a defence against an intelligence agency, and it does not make a blocked pirate or betting site legal to use.
Day to day, the risks are the ordinary ones: open Wi-Fi and phishing. The tunnel deals with the Wi-Fi; it does not stop a convincing fake login page.
Top reasons people use a VPN in Belgium
At home, the main reasons are keeping your browsing out of the provider's records and protecting logins on public Wi-Fi in stations, trains and cafes.
Belgians abroad mostly do not need a VPN for Belgian TV inside the EU: VRT MAX and RTBF Auvio let Belgian residents watch across the EU once they verify their account, for example by text message to a Belgian mobile number. Outside the EU, VRT MAX offers only VRT's own productions and no live channels, and a VPN without a Belgian server cannot change that.
Visitors and expatriates use the nearby French and Dutch servers for French and Dutch catalogues, and the London and US servers for theirs.