How To Protect Your Privacy Online (theverge.com)

Though the U.S. Congress voted to roll back privacy rules, broadband customers can still opt-out of targeted advertising from Comcast, Charter, AT&T, and T-Mobile. But an anonymous reader explains why that's not enough: "It's not clear that opting out will prevent ISPs from putting your data to use," reports The Verge, adding "you're opting out of seeing ads, but not out of providing data." Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, tells NPR that consumers can also "call their providers and opt out of having their information shared." But he also suggests a grass roots effort, calling this "an opportunity to pressure companies to implement good practices and for consumers to say 'I think that you should require opt-in consent and if you're not, why not?'"

To try to stop the creation of that data, Brian Krebs has also posted a guide for choosing a VPN provider, and shared a useful link to a chart comparing VPN providers that was recommended by the EFF. This may help avoid some of the problems reported with VPN services, and Krebs also recommends Tor as a free (albeit possibly slower) option, while sharing an informational link describing Tor's own limitations.
I'm curious what steps Slashdot's readers are taking (if any) to protect their own privacy online?

Comments

VPNs aren't all that great

[Geoffrey.landis]

Motherboard actually had an interesting article pointing out that VPNs actually aren't all that great for routine browsing: https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

Re:VPNs aren't all that great

[Kernel Kurtz]

I have my VPN on most all the time with no issues at all. My regular PC only tests around 30 Mb/s on my 150 Mb/s connection, but that is shared with several other computers anyway. They also may or may not use VPNs and I can still saturate my connection if they are all busy. Just can't do it on one machine.

Ironically I mostly turn off the VPN for online banking, since banks and CC companies often flag connections from random geographic locations as suspicious.

Re:VPNs aren't all that great

[tatman]

Motherboard actually had an interesting article pointing out that VPNs actually aren't all that great for routine browsing: https://motherboard.vice.com/e...

All its doing is moving your identifable traffic from the IPS to the VPN provider. The VPN provider can still sell your browsing habits.

"Don't be online"

[Anonymous Coward]

The only real way...

Re:"Don't be online"

[Rick Schumann]

This AC is being an AC, but he/she/it isn't completely wrong either. The Internet is becoming increasingly unusable. No matter what precautions you're taking, you're putting yourself at an unknown level of risk just by using it at all. Sadly I don't expect this situation to improve, I expect it to get worse. Even the most egalitarian and benign governments are monitoring the Internet to one extent or another, and personally I don't trust any corporation in any country to obey privacy laws if they think they can get away with it, and if they think there's money to be made from collecting and using your personally identifiable data.

Re:"Don't be online"

[DogDude]

The Internet is completely usable. It was never designed to be anonymous or private. You may not think that it's usable for what you want to use it for, that doesn't mean it's unusable.

Re:"Don't be online"

[Kjella]

This AC is being an AC, but he/she/it isn't completely wrong either. The Internet is becoming increasingly unusable. No matter what precautions you're taking, you're putting yourself at an unknown level of risk just by using it at all.

Except that it's a really big boat and a lot more prominent people than you do stupider shit without being snuffed out by black ops teams. And if it's Titanic heading for the iceberg, well then Hitler 2 will have dirt on the 99% of the population that don't care enough that Facebook and Google and everyone else is profiling them. Sure, you can opt out of the Internet. But when the information everyone else leaves is used to turn the country into a new totalitarian state you can't opt out of that.

What lots of people do will in practice make decisions for you too. Not just votes in an election, though obviously the majority rules there too. People vote with their wallets and when they don't vote for the same as me those services shut down because of lack of business. If people don't care about pollution or littering or killing off the local environment or the planet then the result will be the same for everyone. If the public doesn't care about privacy, well the expectation of privacy will cease to exist.

Re:"Don't be online"

[Rick Schumann]

If the public doesn't care about privacy, well the expectation of privacy will cease to exist.

"For YOU", as the meme goes.
Privacy is not decided by the majority, it is decided by the individual. If you fall prey to the troll/meme that privacy is dead and stop protecting your own, then you only have yourself to blame -- and you're helping perpetuate the troll/meme that social media, government agencies, and law enforcement would have you fall for. Keep protecting your private life from the prying eyes of whoever would pry into it. Even if you're not 100% successful, you'll still have some parts of your life that are yours and yours alone, as it should be. Otherwise, do you not see that you'd be living like a convict in a prison, or an animal on a farm, or like a perpetual child, watched and monitored 24/7/365? That's where things are headed if people don't come back around to the basic truth that 'privacy' is a normal, natural, healthy human need, not a sickness or a sign of criminal activity.

You can be online, just don't use:

[jimboinsk]

Any browser that doesn't completely anonymize and secure browsing, social media, hosted email, any other applications that don't encrypt their communications, any network connection that isn't anonymous, any device you don't plan to ever re-use and that wasn't purchased with a traceable payment. I think that covers it, if you accept a couple dozen more assumptions that aren't listed in addition to the above.

Re:You can be online, just don't use:

[gnick]

For a few limited cases, those precautions aren't over-reaching. For the rest of us, though, it's a matter of "good enough." Personally I use a VPN, but in many other situations I could be described as lax on avoiding tracking. There's some common sense, and then there's trading convenience for privacy.

There's nothing you can do with your own ISP

[DogDude]

There's literally nothing you can do if you're paying an ISP for connectivity.

The only way you can begin to have any kind of privacy is to connect through somebody else's connection (public or otherwise). From there, you can encrypt and all that good stuff. But with this new law passed, there's quite literally nothing you can hide from your own ISP.

Re:There's nothing you can do with your own ISP

[terbeaux]

You must be using the new definition of "literally" because otherwise what you wrote doesn't make any sense. There are literally (old definition) hundreds of ways to encrypt communications and obscure the fact that they are even happening at all.

Re:There's nothing you can do with your own ISP

[swillden]

here are literally (old definition) hundreds of ways to encrypt communications and obscure the fact that they are even happening at all. You can encrypt to your heart's content, but your ISP has access to every single packet that flows over your connection, including where and when, even if they don't have immediate access to its contents. So, I'll stand by my use of the word "literally", thanks!

Fine. So my ISP will know that I send a large stream of encrypted packets to one host that is a known Virtual Public Network service provider. My ISP can know nothing about the sites those packets are ultimately destined for, nor anything about their content. My ISP can see how much data I'm sending and receiving, but that's all... and if I really want to it's even possible to hide that by sending/receiving lots of meaningless packets. With a little work (I suspect I'd have to write some custom software, since I don't think what I'm thinking of exists) I could arrange to send and receive a continuous stream of data at a constant rate, 24x7, only a fraction of which is actual traffic. There's probably not enough information implicit in traffic volumes to make that worth the effort, but it could be done.

Re:Tor...

[RotateLeftByte]

And all the businesses that use VPN's for their remote access will be on that list as well.
Those businesses will not be best pleased with undue attention from the TLA's.

I know this is off topic but...

[epyT-R]

I hate the color orange.

and some sites won't load [Re:VPNs aren't all that

[Geoffrey.landis]

To summarize the article linked by the parent: "Wahh, encryption slows down my 100GB connection and evil Republicans broke the Internet. I shouldn't have to use encryption because it's inconvenient and makes it harder for me to watch Netflix."

More or less accurate. You missed "and some sites won't load at all."

Would this work ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Change you user agent to something like this:

"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_3) AppleWebKit/602.4.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0.3 Safari/602.4.8 Copyright2017@"

Then tell your ISP that your queries are copyrighted and they have to negotiate with you (and perhaps pay you) to use them.

Use LOTS AND LOTS Of Microsoft Cloud Products =)

[dryriver]

Windows 10, Edge, Office 365 and the Microsoft Cloud are BRILLIANT for your privacy. Nobody will ever know who you are or what you do online. Nobody. =)

Relevant links

[MrL0G1C]

More VPN providers than you can throw a bucket of sticks at:
https://thatoneprivacysite.net...

TorrentFreak 2017 survey:
https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-s...

I've moved from PrivateVPN (seem incompetent) to CyberGhost premium (slow, dodgy untrustworthy they essentially log), NordVPN next.

Valve/Steam f**ks over VPN users, downloads go at 40KB/s whilst using VPN, they seem to think it's up to them whether I use a VPN, like fuck you valve, that isn't your choice to make.

Re:Calm your tits.

[WaffleMonster]

Before everyone loses their shit over these "rollbacks to privacy", let's
remember that these rules that are being rolled back didn't exist until fucking October. So it's not like we're losing some sort of magic protection that we've
always had. If you weren't losing your shit over your ISP tracking you six months ago, there's no reason to lose your shit over it today.

CISA seems like a good enough new reason to "lose your shit" over ISP tracking.

The fact protections are being retracted due to lobbying by telecom industry might cause people concerned with such an egregious example of regulatory capture to "lose their shit".

Since previously I "lost my shit" on the topic of ISP cyber stalking when it was made public what AT&T and crew were doing to their customers I am entitled to "lose my shit" regardless.

Computer Fingerprints

[Kevin by the Beach]

Don't forget that your computer has fingerprints.

1. Operating System
2. Browser
3. Browser Plugins
(versions and possibly installation dates of above)
4. Cookies
5. Tracking Files (1x1 invisible image isn't just to fill in a small hole in the picture)

Mix all of that together, and add in the IP addresses these fingerprints are observed at and you are very well known. It doesn't matter if you use a VPN or not... The one time that you forget to login to the VPN, you've just left a calling card. On top of that, most people don't realize that their ISP has been quietly rolling out IPv6. Nothing to see here, except a permanent IP address for your home, and every IPv6 compatible device that happens to use the internet via your connection. No worries about running out of address space here. Each mac address that's "found" connecting to your network is remembered.

So, go ahead. Waste time/money on a VPN.. it's only a minor speed bump to the big-data-monster

Breezy and Warm by the Beach