So ISPs will now be able to sell my Web browsing info. I suspect that Spectrum (the rebranded Bright House Networks post-merger with Charter) is not the sort of company that will look this gift horse in the mouth, so I’m probably going to need a new broadband provider.
Has any company promised not to sell customers’ browsing data?
Very few, if any, broadband providers offer service everywhere, so I think you should start by identifying those who provide service where you live and then finding out what their policies are going to be on this matter.
You’re better off finding a reliable VPN (it will cost a monthly sub fee, but not much) and also using privacy tools on your end that block trackers and so on. Note that the latter by themselves will not block your ISP from tracking you.
Expect the VPN marketplace to explode in the next however-many-months now that average users have more reasons to concern themselves with privacy.
I haven’t looked into the data selling thing but I heard on a podcast that the real difference is that you had to opt in to having your data shared before, now you have to opt out. I don’t know if that’s accurate. I’ve been meaning to look into it but maybe all hope is not yet lost.
It’s always been legal for ISPs to sell browsing data. But it doesn’t happen. Mainly because nobody actually cares about your browsing history.
I do wonder what this will do to dark-net.
Right now, there really aren’t all that many reasons to use dark-net, well legitimate reasons, that is.
This has been useful to law enforcement, because the way dark-net works, is that if someone owns enough of the nodes on the network, then they can pierce through your anonymity. This is not a bad thing, as it has allowed our law enforcement to take down pedophilia sites, as well as black market sites for everything from contraband to murder for hire.
If more people start to worry about their privacy online, and they are not trying to hide nefarious activities from the law, but just their porn habits from their ISP, they may start using darknet for that layer of privacy.
As piercing anonymity in the darknet relies on owning a large enough percentage of the network, the more people start using it, the harder it will be to track down those who are using it for illegal purposes.
I think we need to look at the big picture, and decide what will this data be used for? If it is for marketing purposes, I think this is an improvement because the problem with many online ads is that it isn’t targeted properly. Facebook in general has a better handle on being able to serve up ads which contain products or services of interest to me.
As for privacy, collecting IP addresses and seeing what web pages they look at, I don’t see how this is a privacy concern. If a website wants to know the geographic location of their audiences, this is a good thing, so they can better service those areas.
I think we need to look at this clearly before we all start getting paranoid about what appears to be an improvement for the consumer and businesses.
I recommend purposely skewing the browsing data.
Set up a VM to randomly continuously search random strange porn while you are not using the PC.
Or any other totally useless thing you can think of