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.

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.