Unix Samurai Use an OS with Honor and Strength
Once again, your privacy has been voided and commoditized. Your Internet activities are now an item that can be sold for profit, by the very company who provides you with that Internet access access. Your ISP Can Sell your Browsing History!
Your ISP Can Sell your Browsing History
“Good day, Mr or Mrs Product.”
Why would I call you that?
YOU are now being used as another revenue generating product. Your Internet activities are now an item that WILL be sold for profit, by the very company who provides you with that Internet access access. The government has been bribed decided Your ISP Can Sell your Browsing History!
This is far far worse than the search engines selling your data. Every bit of data that enters of leaves your internet connection, regardless of the services you use, or the browser privacy plugins/extensions, that you have installed, will be captured, logged and sold!
Prevent Being Sold
How you you stop this travesty?
Here are a couple options.
VPN Services
A virtual private network (VPN) is a encrypted tunnel across a public telecommunication infrastructure, such as the Internet, to provide individuals with secure (encrypted access to resources).
There are VPN services who do NOT keep logs. If you use their service. they don’t have any files on your activity. They don’t track what you’ve researched, searched for, what sites you’ve visited or downloaded. Since you aren’t the product, of a free service, there is a monthly or annual fee. You can expect to pay $40 or more for a year of VPN access… Trust me, it’s worth it. Chalk it up as a utility bill for privacy!
All your ISP sees is an encrypted stream of traffic to the VPN provider.
Your traffic comes out at the other end of the VPN providers internet connection, but is totally anonymous, and can’t be tracked back to you. This does NOT mean you can use it for illegal activity, that kind of stuff will force the VPN provider to keep your logs, as soon as the cops hit them with a warrant.
There are many, many logless VPN Providers.
I know many of you are going to comment, or email me directly for recommendations. Here is my answer, I currently use EarthVPN. They do NOT keep logs of user connections or activity. This means you can browse the web across an encrypted tunnel and browse in relative privacy.
If you only have one or two computers,EarthVPN allows for up to 3 devices, that originate from the same internet connection (behind your cable modem, or other device).
If you have a houseful of devices like I do, then you’ll want to configure your firewall as a VPN Client. If you don’t have a firewall, find one or build one. Most mini PC’s with multiple network interfaces (Zbox Nano or the PC Engines apu2c4) can run pfSense Firewall Software. It’s got a web interface, for ease of management, and a very large community (reddit, for one) if you need help.
If you have a wireless router that can be upgrade to 3rd party firmware (open-wrt, dd-wrt, etc), then it may be able to be the VPN Client, so you can route your wireless traffic over a VPN tunnel.
If any of this is over your head, but you feel it to be essential, reach out to your friendly neighborhood nerd. If you don’t have one, ask around. One of your friends will have a cousin, nephew or grandchild, who is a total nerd and could use $100!
TOR and TAILS
Tor and Tails (an OS built around TOR) are an alternative to VPNs. They will be quite a bit slower, but are free. Tor/Tails sets up an encrypted tunnel that is sent to random exit points around the globe. It should be as anonymous as the NON-Logging VPN providers, but it’s free. This solution is going to be much slower than VPN. It will be ok for surfing the web, but for downloads or streaming, it will be challenging at best.
Tor
Use Tor when you browse the Internet (or any sites you want to remain private)
What is Tor? Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis
Tails
You can take it a step further, by using a Tails bootable live CD (OS on a USB Stick, CD or DVD ROM). Boot your computer off the TAILS disc and take advantage of TOR and some good browser security tools! Even if a site tries to infect your with malware or track you, when you reboot, all that junk is gone!
Encrypt all your data that leaves your network, since your ISP (Eye-S-P) can no longer be trusted to protect your privacy!
Questions can be addressed in the comments section below.
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