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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday May 27 2017, @06:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the keep-your-ads-out-of-my-streams dept.

In the wake of this spring's Senate ruling nixing FCC privacy regulations imposed on ISPs, you may be (even more) worried about how your data is used, misused, and abused. There have been a lot of opinions on this topic since, ranging from "the sky is falling" to "move along, citizen, nothing to see here." The fact is, ISPs tend to be pretty unscrupulous, sometimes even ruthless, about how they gather and use their customers' data. You may not be sure how it's a problem if your ISP gives advertisers more info to serve ads you'd like to see—but what about when your ISP literally edits your HTTP traffic, inserting more ads and possibly breaking webpages?

With a Congress that has demonstrated its lack of interest in protecting you from your ISP, and ISPs that have repeatedly demonstrated a "whatever-we-can-get-away-with" attitude toward customers' data privacy and integrity, it may be time to look into how to get your data out from under your ISP's prying eyes and grubby fingers intact. To do that, you'll need a VPN.

Source: Ars Technica


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:38AM (4 children)

    Single-user VPNs are all fine and good for stopping your ISP from monitoring you but to any TLA they're about as effective as a tissue paper umbrella. If the majority of traffic from your VPN is going to a single address, it's not at all difficult for them to back-trace you through that VPN without even having to have access to it. If you want plausible deniability as well as opacity, you'd better have at least a couple dozen people using your VPN at any given time.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by art guerrilla on Saturday May 27 2017, @06:54PM

    by art guerrilla (3082) on Saturday May 27 2017, @06:54PM (#516499)

    um, i was going to say something about this, but i was distracted by boobies...
    .
    oh, yeah, to uneducated *me*, ALL these schemes of hiding yourself with various tricked out browsers, encrypted emails, etc, etc, has one fatal flaw which you allude to: when only .0000001 to .01% of the users are using these tools, that AUTOMATICALLY puts you in a 'suspect' category (in the eyes of Empire), such that you are simply putting a big red flag on all your inertnet activities when you use these tools/techniques, REGARDLESS of whether they are 'cracked' or compromised, MERELY the factoid you are using these tools/techniques puts you in the crosshairs of the all-seeing eye of sauron...
    .
    the 'solution' isn't to fool sauron, the solution is to drop the ring of power in the chasm at mt doom...

  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:19PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 27 2017, @10:19PM (#516544)

    I have a single-user VPN but it's not used to tunnel all the traffic. Just the traffic i want to extra protect. One browser uses the VPN and the other doesn't. Games don't use it.

    Just a 5$ linode and uses the Shadowsocks server. Every other service is turned off, including ssh. I suppose you could run multiple people through the thing but i feel like that might attract more attention?

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  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:01PM (1 child)

    by Gaaark (41) on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:01PM (#516727) Journal

    What about a SN VPN?

    Is the cost prohibitive? How much would monthly/yearly cost?

    Does anyone have experience with this?

    I use PIA, but don't know them from Jack Off, .....

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    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday May 28 2017, @01:25PM

      We've talked about it but came to the conclusion that we didn't want the feds coming to us with a blanket warrant and getting access to all of what little information we do store; website and vpn both. Doing it as a separately incorporated project we haven't really looked into yet.

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      My rights don't end where your fear begins.