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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: 3, Insightful) by Frost on Saturday May 27 2017, @07:47PM
The only thing the roll-your-own VPN protects you against is your ISP. Big ISPs like Comcast can get away with anything because they're literally the only choice many people have for Internet access. Hosting providers have no such captive market -- their customers are highly mobile and there are plenty of competitors providing equivalent service.
It's a big mistake to trust entities like Comcast just because they're incompetent and only care about money. Sure, they're probably not going to snoop on you personally. They're probably not even going to run dragnet analysis a la NSA. But they absolutely will collect everything they can, so they can sell it to whoever is willing to pay -- including government agencies at all levels (from the FBI all the way down to local parking enforcement), advertisers, data collection aggregators, private investigators, spammers, scammers, bullies and crooks. And furthermore they cannot be trusted to keep their logs and databases secure, so even if there is anybody in the world so scummy that even Comcast won't deal with them, they will eventually get their hands on your data -- ALL of it -- when it inevitably "leaks" to "hackers". That is why you should protect yourself from your ISP.
Data that aren't collected can't be compromised. Hosting providers and VPN services in a competitive environment have fairly strong incentives not to collect. Monopoly ISPs have no such incentives.