VPN helps you to hide from your ISP
Question: In light of the recent Internet privacy legislation, will using a VPN keep my ISP from tracking what I do online?
Answer: The recent bill passed by both houses of Congress will essentially overturn a rule passed by the previous FCC chairman that would have required Internet Service Providers to ask for your permission before sharing your browsing and usage data with third parties.
The rule was never put in place, so in a sense, the recent bill leaves things the way that they have always been.
Regardless of any regulations, your ISP has and always will know the most about how you generally use the Internet as a normal course of providing you their service.
The issue is really more of what they can do with that information, which is now a confusing mess that’s up in the air.
Services like Facebook and Google can only track you when you’re using their resources or their associated third parties, which admittedly, is pretty extensive but your ISP logs every site that you visit.
For clarity, when you visit encrypted sites (those that start with https://), your ISP can see that you went there, but they can’t see what you do within the site, so much of the “privacy” that many people want already exists.
Using a VPN, which stands for Virtual Private Network, will reduce your ISP’s ability to track where you go online because everything you do after you connect to a VPN is masked in a private “tunnel.”
Your ISP would then only see you connecting to the VPN, but nothing afterwards, but there are tradeoffs.
If you decide to us a VPN service, you’re essentially trading WHO can see everything you’re doing from your ISP to your VPN service provider.
Can you trust a VPN service provider any more than your ISP? That‘s the primary question you’ll have to answer yourself before making the change, so make sure you’ve thoroughly researched any company before you start using their service.
Ken Colburn is founder and CEO of Data Doctors Computer Services https:// datadoctors.com. Ask any tech question at: https://facebook.com/DataDoctors or on Twitter @TheDataDoc.