A guide to hiding your browsing history from your prying ISP

The outstanding issue regarding online privacy and the government’s decision to closely monitor and track companies browsing history continues. Whatever the government decides to do regarding the FCC’s online privacy rules, there are steps you can still take to protect yourself on the internet.

This means that companies such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast can collect data about your daily internet usage. Your ISP can sell your traffic without permission, and the White House stated that it strongly supports repealing Obama’s rules. Trump’s new bill is expected to come into law shortly.

If the FCC eliminates its privacy rules, additional information aside from webpages you visit can be collected by service providers. Your ISP can track any activity you have any time that your computer connects to the internet. For example, if you check the weather on your phone, your ISP will know that you’re concerned about the rain and will display ads about umbrellas. They could sell your daily data to a marketing firm so they can serve you relevant ads.

Thankfully, you can hide your browsing history from telecom companies trying to snoop into your private life. More than likely, your ISP will allow you to opt out of specific data collection, but it’s not clear if they’re required to do so if privacy rules are eliminated. The FTC suggests that service providers offer an opt-in option, but ISPs could ultimately ignore that request.

Here’s how you can place a barrier between your internet habits and snooping ISPs:

VPN:

If you opt to pay for a virtual private network (VPN), you’ll assure that you’re searching the internet through an encrypted channel. While your browsing habits will still be visible to the VPN service, you will be safe from a spying ISP because your traffic will come from a random server instead of your house.

Users can subscribe to VPN services for mobile or desktop. But you’ll likely spend some money because using a free VPN service will not grant you the same privacy. Selecting the right VPN for your needs can be tricky, but this guide can show you the differences between many services. For those who are tech-savvy, you can follow the instructions on how to set up your own here.

However, a VPN won’t protect you from what ISPs may soon be able to do. Without protection, ISPs can monitor, collect, and store just about everything you do online and sell that information to advertisers and data-mining companies.

Tor:

If you want to take a more serious approach and avoid the prying eyes of the government and corporations, Tor is the best option. The only downside is that it is not the most convenient option or the most thorough.

Tor is a well-known, free anonymity software and is simple to install on a desktop. A version for Android is also available through Orbot, but is slightly more difficult to install. Once you have Tor installed, you can browse the web completely anonymously.

As with everything, there are a few weaknesses to using Tor all of the time. For one thing, it only protects you from snooping eyes when you’re surfing the internet in the Tor browser. Other internet-connected apps, including email clients or chat apps, cannot be anonymized. Additionally, Tor doesn’t work hand in hand with sites that run Cloud Flare’s security software, which a large portion of sites on the web do. If you visit these sites, you’ll find yourself occasionally typing in a captcha to prove that you’re human, but Tor users are often required to type these in every time they visit a new domain.

While Tor is not a perfect solution for browsing the web fully privately, it has a much bigger impact than using incognito windows in Chrome or private browsing tabs in Safari.

Via Gizmodo