Understanding Online Privacy and What You Can Do To Protect It

All your private online data, including the websites you visit, the content of your chats and e-mails, your personal information, and your location, just became suddenly less secure. This is because Congress just blocked crucial privacy regulations. This will allow your Internet Service Provider to collect all your data and sell all that data to the highest bidder without asking for your permission. This must have been what the Indians felt when negotiating with the white man.

A pair of resolutions, which passed through the Senate and House with exclusively Republican votes, will roll back rules previously proposed by the Democratic leadership of the Federal Communications Commission during the Obama administration that was passed in October of last year but had not yet gone into effect.

These FCC rules called the Net Neutrality Rules or Title II will be completely dead following the expected signature of President Trump. The rules would have required ISP’s to get explicit and specific approval from customers before selling the following “sensitive data”:

§  Your precise geo-location

§  Children’s information

§  Health information

§  Financial information

§  Social Security numbers

§  Web browsing history

§  App usage history

§  Content of communications

Since the rules were rolled back through the Congressional Review Act, the FCC is also barred from creating any similar rules in the years to come. In theory, the information collected will be stored under some sort of ID separate from your actual name. But that’s cold comfort considering the level of detail from this sort of information would make your identity a dead giveaway. Also, ISP’s can hardly be trusted to keep your information suitably safe from prying eyes since they can sell all these to the highest bidder.

There are a few things you can do to try and keep your data safe, and while they aren’t really easy to do, they’re worth the effort if you value your privacy.

Inform your ISP you’re “opting out”

You can visit or call your ISP to inform them that you’re opting out of all advertising-related things in your package, and tell them point blank that they need your permission before selling any of your data to advertisers. The former will force them to comply, though the latter is doubtful, but at least will give them second thoughts.

Limit data passing through your ISP

Try to keep sensitive data such as those listed at the top by reverting back to hard copies or not storing or mentioning these online but storing them instead in removable external drives or burning them on CD’s. You can also opt to buy apps that can encrypt data or your ISP address, but these will often charge an annual subscription fee. Also, if you opt for using a VPN to hide your ISP address, remember that a VPN is itself an ISP so research on a VPN before committing to it.