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.

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.

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:"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.

I know this is off topic but...

[epyT-R]

I hate the color orange.

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. =)

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.