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VPN Services That Take Anonymity Seriously

posted by paulej72 on Monday March 17 2014, @12:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-can't-find-me dept.

Angry Jesus writes:

"The TorrentFreak news site just released their latest annual survey of VPN providers' privacy policies. The results are very encouraging: it seems that the idea that online privacy is important is becoming more widespread and the price is quite affordable, just a few dollars a month.

For nearly a year I've been using one of the VPN services on their list. Not so much for the anonymous bit-torrent capability, but rather to frustrate Big Data's attempts to track me. I typically use domestic USA end-points and switch between 10-20 of them during the course of the day. That is coupled with various privacy extensions to Firefox (blocking cookies, JavaScript, Flash, ads, cross-site includes, and randomizing my user-agent). So far, I've been quite happy with how it has worked out. Even if I can't protect myself from the NSA, I can protect myself from just about everyone else."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by RamiK on Monday March 17 2014, @09:03AM

    by RamiK (1813) on Monday March 17 2014, @09:03AM (#17463)

    Personally I've written a primitive search bot as a Firefox extension that does a multi-level walk all day long. I've limited it to a single connection and capped the traffic low enough it won't disturb any of my work.

    I know it works because of all the random, and frankly, weird ads I'm getting.*

    I suppose the next logical step is a distributed search engine. It will justify the excess network loads and address the privacy concerns all at once.

    * The sheer amount of woman's handbags is disturbing... It's like half the Internet is financed through fake leather and jewelry. What happened to good old porn?

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  • (Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Monday March 17 2014, @09:35AM

    by wantkitteh (3362) on Monday March 17 2014, @09:35AM (#17475) Homepage Journal

    There are distributed search engines in existence, my brief research on the subject for another comment reply recently found one called Yacy that looks fairly promising. Naturally it's not as fully-featured as web-based centralized search engines but it can only get better with more support.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by DNied on Monday March 17 2014, @09:58AM

      by DNied (3409) on Monday March 17 2014, @09:58AM (#17482)

      Unfortunately, it's written in Java.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by WizardFusion on Monday March 17 2014, @10:14AM

    by WizardFusion (498) on Monday March 17 2014, @10:14AM (#17489) Journal

    I don't get this. You are doing all this work to hide your searching, yet you are sill allowing adverts to be shown?
    I block everything. Adblocker, noscript, ghostery, etc.
    I have not seen an advert in years.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 17 2014, @10:36AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 17 2014, @10:36AM (#17499)

      "I block everything"

      Damn, now I know why I couldn't read your post!

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday March 17 2014, @10:27AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday March 17 2014, @10:27AM (#17493) Homepage
    I too am happy that I get very random appearing ads tailored to me, that tells me they don't know much about me.

    I run this to help skew things:
    http://fatphil.org/tmp/confuse_google.pl.txt

    Suggestions for improvement gratefully received.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by xyzzyyzzyx on Monday March 17 2014, @05:08PM

      by xyzzyyzzyx (3799) on Monday March 17 2014, @05:08PM (#17702)

      AGGHH! Perl! Run awayyyy!