In the United Kingdom they have discussed whether or not to ban encrypted messaging systems (like WhatsApp), as it was recently used to communicate just before the recent terror attacks in London. The discussion seems to be a fair discussion, but what has just happened in the United States seems to be very far off!
In the United States there has been two votes, and both votes have been supporting how ISP’s can sell your Internet history. They can in other words sell information about which websites you visit and what you do online to anyone willing to pay for the information. I once read that the police no longer need to ask the ISP for their support and help to get information about certain users, they can simply pay for the information and get it at once.
But, what kind of information will they sell about your online activity?
If you surf like most other Internet users, they will be able to see every single website you visit that starts with http://. They will also be able to see information that you transmit online (un-encrypted), and already this might be enough to give lots of people high blood pressure. Maybe you think you are safe, because you visit secure websites that starts with https://. Well, the truth is that you are doing better, but the ISP will still know that you visit https://www.securedomain.com/. They will not be able to track which sites you actually visit on that actual domain, but they will now your online whereabouts in general.
This sounds terrible to us, and if you so far believed that it would be great to surf the Internet without a VPN, you might want to reconsider. A VPN will make your online movements invisible to your ISP; and with no tracks of your activity, there is nothing to sell to whoever might be interested in tracking you online.
But, I don’t care if someone watch my activities online?
Isn’t it so, that only bad guys are afraid to reveal what they are doing online? In a way that might be true, but it still ain’t completely true. Maybe you do not want people across the world to see what websites you are visiting, not because what you are visiting is illegal, but simply because you want to keep it hidden. It still might not be a situation, but when it comes to freedom of though and also freedom of religion, there are countries in which you would be punished for listening to Christian music and Christian teachings. That is of course not true in the USA, but there are countries in which you can only access such material if you lay low and make your online steps hidden from the authorities and your ISP.
