Senate votes to let ISPs sell your Web browsing history to advertisers

originally posted by: alphabetaone
a reply to: dreamingawake

Nah that's not true. Unless the people running TOR are also willing to provide your browsing history, which they might for all I know, but it's relatively unlikely.

I will add though, that if there are any proxy servers that one CAN trust, your best bet is still through a proxy and not some series of routers setup by unknown faces.

Do you have sources? Asking because does anyone really trust TOR that much that it won't or be hyjaked enough not to do that?

I believe it's well known that government agencies run exit nodes(one source).

Does using encryption make you a bigger target for the NSA?

Soon after the Guardian released the first of many whistleblower documents, describing NSA domestic spying activities in the United States, readers began asking, "Because of all the snooping, should I start encrypting my email?" The answer seemed simple....

Answering the question of whether to encrypt or not became significantly less simple a few weeks later when the Guardian released Minimization Procedures Used by the National Security Agency, a document gleaned from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by Edward Snowden. Section Five of the paper is of particular interest (courtesy of the Guardian).

Source


I agree with using VPN over proxies.

a reply to: TheScale




Figured they should be concerned about this senate vote in the least:

ATS came out in support of Net Neutrality - One of the threads "Jones wrong on NN"
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Last October, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed a set of privacy rules on ISPs that restrict them from sharing your online data with third parties without your consent and require them to adopt "reasonable measures" to protect consumers' data from hackers.

However, now the FCC suspended privacy rules before they came into effect.

The reason? President Donald Trump's newly appointed FCC chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican and ex-Verizon lawyer. Ajit Pai, who has openly expressed his views against net neutrality in the past, just last week said during a speech at Mobile World Congress that Net Neutrality was "a mistake" and indicated that the Commission is now moving back to internet regulations.

Now, Pai suspends privacy rules on ISPs, arguing that they favored companies like Google and Facebook, which are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), over internet providers like Comcast and Verizon.

Source


And sharing to answer the whole Trump question better.

a reply to: dreamingawake

I hope this ruling only affects the US.

With the greatest possible respect to members there, your senate should only be permitted to have any say about US citizens data privacy, and none whatsoever about mine.

So they could or can sell this information to anybody? And I am assuming to multiple parties?

What happens when Mr. Jon Q. Public gets an email showing his search of say gay porn and is blackmailed by it?

Or lets say a large corp. wants to look at their employees, surely they could then just request their internet history. Heaven forbid you looked at Monster jobs or anything of the sort.

Or how about we start at the top and look ay every damn person that voted for this and reveal their internet history to the public... That could be fun.

Or disturbing.......depending on your frame of reference.

a reply to: dreamingawake

hahaha, perhaps the population will now take seriously the privilege of the internet. The internet is a privilege, not a right IMO. This has zero effect on people who stick to the real world for the majority of human interaction as well s shopping.

So does the ISP still know your browsing history if you go through VPN's ??

originally posted by: worldstarcountry
a reply to: dreamingawake

hahaha, perhaps the population will now take seriously the privilege of the internet. The internet is a privilege, not a right IMO. This has zero effect on people who stick to the real world for the majority of human interaction as well s shopping.

So does the ISP still know your browsing history if you go through VPN's ??

VPN's sit between the website you want to visit and the ISP. From your ISP's point of view all they see is traffic going to and from the VPN. However, all the data that gets sent to you still goes over their servers. So if they were to log that information, they can see the webpages you go to but not the addresses of those webpages.

a reply to: Aazadan

so what specifically would they be selling to advertisers in this specific instance? Would I start seeing more ads for VPN's but nothing related to what I was actually browsing such as bullion, crystals and saltwater fish and stuff? That would be funny if advertisers just kept buying profiles filled with nothing but proxy servers ...

a reply to: TrueBrit

The UK passed a similar bill not too long ago dealing with how ISPs use your data. IMO what's discussed with it is even more concerning than our bill over here-then of course unless it's also in the bill here as well.

Source

The UK now wields unprecedented surveillance powers — here’s what it means

The UK government will keep a record of every website every citizen visits for up to a year, with this information also including the apps they use on their phone, and the metadata of their calls. This information is known as internet connection records, or ICRs, and won’t include the exact URL of each site someone visits, but the base domain. For this particular webpage, for example, the government would know you went to www.theverge.com, the time you visited, how long you stayed, your IP address, and some information about your computer — but no individual pages.

Each Internet Service Provider (ISP) and mobile carrier in the UK will have to store this data, which the government will pay them to do. Police officers will then be able to access a central search engine known as the "request filter" to retrieve this information. Exactly how this request filter will work still isn’t clear (will you be able to find every visitor to a certain website, for example, then filter that down to specific weeks or days?), but it will be easy to tie browsing data to individuals. If you sign a contract for your phone, for example, that can be linked to your web history.

The US bill may not fully directly impact others outside of here but surely will impact in one way or another.

*rubs forehead*

Ungh you guys and your insistance that TOR is so great and safe.

You realize they bust people all the time on TOR, right? If you visit a non-onion site you have to use what is called an "exit node".

A compromised exit node can reveal a lot about you. It can steal your login/password information on various non-onion sites. It can build a profile about you, as all information leaving and returning to the exit node isn't encrypted.

If you use TOR to surf the "regular" internet, you are stepping outside the safe little encrypted sandbox, and using exit nodes to do so. Anytime you step outside the .onion world, an exit node sees where you are going and could potentially be sniffing your packet data.

Using patterns of what websites and the information you share on those websites about yourself, as well as the browser agent profile -- eventually a pattern of who you are, and where you live ect can be established. Then, the authorities just need to check with your ISP to see if you are using TOR.

And even if you stay INSIDE .onion sites, AKA inside the "TOR world", the FBI apparently has tools that can track you down. The FBI recently had to drop some pedophilia charges against a man because they didn't want to reveal how they caught him on TOR.

And with XKEYSCORE it's all pretty much pointless anyway if you are being targeted.They can crack your VPN with that, and watch your exit node traffic and build a profile on you.

Sorry, but you have to accept that if you somehow become interesting -- you can and will be found...even if you use burner laptops, Tails, VPNs, TOR and public Wifi. There's usually always security cameras setup where there's public wifi... and a dude wearing a mask using wifi in public looks pretty damn suspicious.

a reply to: Kettu
well then I guess we shouldn't do anything illegal right??? I will continue to shop with a VPN when buying online. The real premise here is mostly that they sell your browsing data for revenue to people who can target ads at you. So we should all star seeing ads telling us to download/buy this or that VPN.

a reply to: Kettu

This Senate vote isn't about government tracking. It's about commercial tracking.

originally posted by: Aazadan
a reply to: Kettu

This Senate vote isn't about government tracking. It's about commercial tracking.

Companies are scarier to me than the government. Private versions of the CIA and NSA exist but aren't ever talked about.

Since I mentioned earlier as a concern, here - www.abovetopsecret.com..., thought this would be fitting.

Well, here we go, Net Neutrality may be at an end:

Trump Sets Sights On Net Neutrality Rules

Next up on President Donald Trump's to-do list? Unraveling Obama-era net neutrality rules, the president's spokesman Sean Spicer said late this week. Enacted in February 2015 under then-president Barack Obama, these rules classified large companies like Comcast (cmcsa, +0.21%) that deliver Internet to consumers as public utilities.

That meant those companies were unable to discriminate against content providers based on the type and amount of content delivered. The goal was to prevent them from providing fast lanes for some companies (including themselves) and slow lanes for other content providers like Netflix (nflx, -0.17%), Google (goog, -0.23%), or Facebook (fb, -0.22%).

source

a reply to: dreamingawake


I've been thinking about this, and the whole situation in totality. What communities should do, is setup a community Domain. Have the domain controller (with backups) reside somewhere in a rented building that the community agrees on by way of a vote, and the community pays for a single person to man, keep secure, and update as necessary the domain controller. Obviously these would have to be done in small pockets in any community. The domain controller is where the bandwidth resides, and each supporting member of the effort gets an individual CAL (Client Access License) for their household. As supporting members grow, so too can the bandwidth. I wonder what the viability of renting space in the public utilities are for say, stringing CAT6/CAT5e to each of the supporting members, and if so, would it be cost prohibitive. Otherwise each successive household could contain a WiFi repeater to propagate a high speed wireless signal back to the domain controller.


The only information hence, the ISP would be aware of, are from MULTIPLE households and would completely obfuscate any personally identifiable browsing habits/content as the HTTP GET's would be coming from the domain and not an individual machine, and only one (likely large) payment to an ISP for access.

a reply to: alphabetaone

It's very cost prohibitive in low population density. It's approximately $3/foot to run proper cabling. In high population densities like apartments that's not too bad, but in low population density it's pretty expensive. Half the country lives in fairly rural settings, so our cost for this type of infrastructure is much higher than some areas of the country that get good internet speeds.

Years ago whitefi was supposed to fix all of this, by providing cheap and easy access to wifi without requiring the last mile expense. But that fizzled out, and isn't even very fast by todays standards.

Wifi repeaters are a bad idea too. Think about how they work, every repeater you add increases latency because the signal has to go to your router, to the repeaters, and back again. A network built on lots of repeaters is going to have really high latency.

Something you may be interested in is an idea known as meshnets, but again they only really work with a high population density.

originally posted by: Aazadan
a reply to: alphabetaone

It's very cost prohibitive in low population density. It's approximately $3/foot to run proper cabling. In high population densities like apartments that's not too bad, but in low population density it's pretty expensive. Half the country lives in fairly rural settings, so our cost for this type of infrastructure is much higher than some areas of the country that get good internet speeds.

Yes. I imagine it would be. I hadn't taken rural communities into account for that.

Years ago whitefi was supposed to fix all of this, by providing cheap and easy access to wifi without requiring the last mile expense. But that fizzled out, and isn't even very fast by todays standards.

Wifi repeaters are a bad idea too. Think about how they work, every repeater you add increases latency because the signal has to go to your router, to the repeaters, and back again. A network built on lots of repeaters is going to have really high latency.

Well as much as I'm not a fan of the latency, for those who value their privacy, it may be worth the slowdown...or perhaps all browsing through the domain controller, and a secondary net for ancillary network requirements (games, video, etc) ... before you say it, yes I understand the accelerated cost.

Something you may be interested in is an idea known as meshnets, but again they only really work with a high population density.

I know of them, but it wouldn't help much on the privacy concern as the only real way to get the privacy people desire would not be accomplished by flooding but by zero presence. Not to mention it's only a matter of time before the ISP's develop counter solutions to a flooding scheme. Not to say it isn't a good idea, but ive never been a bandaid type of guy...I tend to shoot for all or nothing solutions if you understand what I mean.

a reply to: alphabetaone

. What communities should do, is setup a community Domain.

I agree many areas would benefit as the internet is barely there and literally piped(underwater) into the areas. Whether privacy concern or for helping the communities overall with an internet connection, good suggestion to look into. Also, good convo in the last replies. Will be following this.