As part of our mission to provide private browsing to as many people as possible, we’re excited to announce that Tenta is now available in Turkish. It’s the top requested language on a long list of languages we’re working our way down.

Why Turkish, you ask? First of all, we’ve had a lot of requests from people in Turkey would want to use Tenta’s secure browsing, built-in VPN, full data encryption, media players, video downloader, secure DNS, and Zone management — so we figured we’d give the people what they want. (We do listen to your requests and feedback!)

Secondly, according to the Freedom on the Net 2017 report, the past year wasn’t a great one for internet freedom in Turkey. From May 2016 to May 2017, the report dropped Turkey’s internet freedom score from 61 to 66 out of 100, with a designation of “Not Free.” The rating was based broadly on increased suspension of telecommunications services and disruption of social media access during the year. Additionally, Turkey saw widespread arrests of journalists and suspected members of an anti-government group that was blamed for the failed coup — and for both instances, the government used information gathered from online activity in order to make arrests. This is the seventh year in a row that internet freedom in Turkey has declined.

Turkey also suffered a hard year politically, with more than a dozen terrorist attacks, an economic crisis, a monetary crisis, and a failed coup on July 15, 2016. As is becoming more common worldwide, those political and economic upheavals were accompanied by government restriction of internet and social media access. Some of the sites that were blocked at various times include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Wikipedia.

Simultaneous to these disruptions, however, internet access actually increased during the same time period. Internet penetration increased from 43.07 percent at the end of 2015 to 53.5 percent at the end of 2016. On mobile, Turkey boasts a penetration rate of over 107 percent. It seems that government attempts to restrict Turkish citizens’ access to the internet isn’t putting on a damper on Turkish interest in getting online.

With this Turkish language update, Turkish citizens can now more easily use the Tenta VPN to circumvent throttled networks and access social media and messaging sites when the government targets them. Our secure, encrypted browsing also means that no one — not their government, not companies trying to target advertising, not even us — has access to what they’re doing when they’re using in the internet. It’s an added layer of security for people who are living in a pretty insecure environment right now.

And Turkish language access isn’t the only exciting news today! With this latest update, we’ve also updated our HTTPS Everywhere feature, Tenta DNS, and our Video Downloader. So whether you’re in Turkey, the United States, or anywhere else, check out the latest Tenta updates for encrypted, secure browsing.