These days, where everyone (and everything) is on the Internet, it is very important to preserve your online privacy.
Recently, Congress cast a special vote repealing rules about how customer data should be handled by the Internet service providers.
The republican-led House of Representative has voted 215 -205 in support of repealing the regulations put into effect last year. And most recently, President Trump signed this resolution into law, meaning Internet Service Providers (ISP) is allowed to share your data to anyone. The previous regulation had required consent by customers to the Internet provider before it could make use of the Internet activity for marketing and advertising.
Each and every customer expects his data to be maintained well, but when privacy becomes compromised, rightfully, many customers become outraged, especially considering that they pay for their services. Privacy must be maintained when the customer pays for the service.
Let’s think about this issue. Today, we all use the Internet for everything we need – communicating with friends and family (email, messaging), surfing the web (googling everything, including our most personal illnesses), gaming, television, and many more. This is the perfect opportunity for any Internet provider to grab tons of data about us.
Internet Providers Neglect the Online Privacy
From our overall activities, our entire information is out there. This is the reason it becomes so easy for Internet service providers to neglect the privacy of the customers and to begin doing whatever they wished with customer’s data. They have started selling customer data to third party companies as well.
More and more, it becomes incredibly hard for customers to keep privacy of their data, especially if the ISP itself starts releasing such activities. This all began with an uproar from these ISP claiming that it is fair to use customer data they collect from the Internet. This was the main support behind this repeal. Internet Service providers even began citing examples of other online properties doing the same thing.
So with the Internet service providers arguing the unfair advantage of the other properties, and hence began reasoning that they must be allowed to use the customer data as well. They argued to use the internet activities logs of their customers to either sell or use it in the way they wanted to.
However, there is a big difference between web property and Internet service providers. For a customer using a web property, that web property is indeed allowed to grab some customer data and sell it to third party. This doesn’t worry the customer too much since indeed he didn’t pay anything to visit that web property. Therefore, the customer access their site for free and in exchange, the property is allowed to sell some Internet activity log of mine. They think, ‘At most, they will have some search log and not my personal information.’ This is the reason if a web property collects some information about the customer, they will not argue nor take that to serious extent.
But this is not the same with the Internet service provider.
Internet service providers have all the personal information about the customer. They will have personal customer data such as email address, telephone number, address, and most importantly a social security number.
One more point to note is that there are only a few select choices for our broadband Internet service providers. With limited choices, we can’t easily choose trustworthy Internet providers, as the lawmakers suggest.
This is the reason that the best solution is to choose is a VPN Service. To protect your online privacy, a VPN (virtual private Network) will provide you the safety over your data.
Virtual Private Network
A virtual private network can provide encrypted connection on the Internet. This encrypted connection can make it impossible for the internet service provider to grab data from your online activities.
So virtual private network helps protect personal data of a customer that they are using to perform some online activity. Here, the virtual private network or VPN acts as a middle man. This will be the middle man to protect the customer data between customer and the internet service provider.
Once the customer is connected to a virtual private network, the entire traffic of the customer is encrypted before it even reaches the Internet. This will make it a challenge or even impossible for the Internet service provider in monitoring the activity of the customer. So, neither the activity log nor any customer personal data like a social security number will be able to be accessed by the ISP.
There are many virtual private networks available. Among them, IPVanish is one of the best services. The best feature about them is that they do not store customers’ logs. Through this, they ensure that customer data is highly secured and privacy is protected.
Online Privacy
Online Privacy is one of the most important things to take care about for Internet users. Considering its importance, we recommend our preferred virtual private network. It can be downloaded and installed in any devices and will protect you online.
Especially when entering personal data, it’s important to keep it private and secured. This is why it is better to protect such online information through technologies like a VPN. With a VPN, it is possible to avoid collection and selling of personal data by Internet Service Providers.
Also check out our IPVanish Setup Guides!
