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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
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday May 27 2017, @03:15PM
Well, my take on it:
1) Any old VPN will do, to a "VPN provider" or a VPS which you control (but in a another datacentre, handled by another ISP). However nothing stops the other ISP just monitoring your endpoint anyway (as you would be their "customer" as well). So might be worth looking at another country.
2) A VPN pointing to another country without a data sharing agreement with whichever country you reside in (so e.g. if you are in the EU/US, Russia or one of the Asian countries could be good). They , like the US and EU, are more interested in "managing" their own populations rather than what you are up to, unless you are trying to interfere politically in their countries. Plus sends quite a strong signal in the sense that if your government wanted to find out, they could see regular payments to a VPN company in another country.
Alternatively, build and make use of a totally encrypted network that sits on top of the internet. I only know of one which is not only the most popular, but rather than being a specific service like "IM", or "P2P", it supports a framework to write apps on it, like an encrypted network layer. It is called I2P: https://geti2p.net/en/ [geti2p.net]
Sends a more subtle signal, in the sense that all your traffic will become encrypted if you switch to I2P. So if they try to snoop they will find nothing, and won't even know where you are connecting to.
3) Nothing really, if you use something like I2P, the ISP/government will notice the large bulk of totally encrypted traffic. That could signal you out for "closer monitoring". You can do things like encapsulate data in another protocol like a tunnel (e.g. IP over ICMP/DNS), but they can notice (they have the resources to dedicate to this kind of thing), or use "sneakernet" type data transfer.
Or look into building out community wireless networks, which would give you a network infrastructure under your control. You can then link up different community wifi networks across the internet via VPN links as the backbone between them.