Okay this article is admittedly partially a soapbox but I think most of you will agree. I believe that our congress sold out to the large internet providers like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and others when both houses passed legislation to strip away internet privacy rules that prevented these same internet providers from SELLING your personal browsing history and personal information to anyone that wants to pay for it. And who might want it? All those guys with pop-ups and advertisements that mysteriously try to sell you whatever you might have been looking up on the internet. How did they know I was looking at Chicken shoes for Grace?
Our elected representatives are charged with looking out for our best interests. In this case, they abandoned that and sold out to these companies. It is no accident that the same congress-people that voted for this bill, which btw, was written by those same internet company lobbyists, received huge campaign contributions from these companies. So, rest assured, it was not a big national emergency that required a new law to allow them to sell your information, nope, it was, as usual, money. There is no reason whatsoever that these companies should be selling your data, it is not in your interest and not in the national interest. It was a complete sell-out.
But this is going to be the law and you need to be informed about how it may impact your internet usage and what you can do to protect your data.
When I learned about this, one of the first things I did was to contact my internet service provider in Vermont, Green Mountain Access. I got an immediate response from my friends there saying not only were they not ever going to sell my data but that they reiterated their long standing privacy policy. They even posted a notice on their web site:
Recent news has prompted many to reach out regarding changes in Internet privacy protection. Please be assured that Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom/Green Mountain Access has stood for customer privacy from the beginning. We have no intention of selling or freely distributing private information.
So, one of the best ways to prevent your browsing history from being sold is to know your ISP and check into their privacy policy. If they do not explicitly say they will not sell your information, assume that they will.
Okay, so I have Comcast down here in Key West so I am pretty sure they are on the other side of this discussion and would love to sell my boring web browsing history. Well, I don’t want them to regardless of how boring it is because, well it is mine, not theirs to sell. So, one way is to use a VPN connection. Fortunately, Small Dog Electronics maintains a VPN network and our ISP believes in privacy so using VPN makes sense. Even if you do not have a company VPN network there are many VPN networks that will give you access for a monthly fee. Do NOT use free VPN services — there really is not a free lunch!
There are more secure browsers to try if you do not want to use a VPN network, such as Opera or Tor but they come with trade-offs in terms of ease of use and speed.
Those are really the only options I can think of besides making your internet browsing really really boring. But the most important thing you can do is to write or phone your congressperson and express your outrage that they would sell you out and remind them that they work for you. This is not a little minor hiccup it is a major shift in privacy that certainly reminds me of Orwell’s 1984.