HN Explorer

What is the best way to protect your internet activity from an intrusive ISP

5 points by suprgeek ↗ HN
All:

With bills like these [1] looming over the horizon, what is the best* way to protect your internet activity from your intrusive ISP?

Yes VPN is the one-word answer - if so please be specific - Which provider? which plan? Does Google et al work properly with out captchas

*Here BEST means - very little speed loss (after using whatever it is) and easy to install/set-up (think aged Parents), US specific (end users are in US)

[1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/gop-senators-new-bill-would-let-isps-sell-your-web-browsing-data/

4 comments

[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 14.4 ms ] thread
savethefuture
Very difficult to avoid ISP intrusion since they are the ones allowing you access to the internet. As you've said already a VPN is the way to solve this but even that is still going to have its own problems related to privacy. I would never trust a vpn provider, I would recommend you learn to setup your own vps box (linode, digitalocean, aws, etc) and run an ssh vpn through it. Then you have absolute confidence that your activities are not being monitored by the provider. But again there is an ISP giving your vps access to the net now which can monitor you, and if THEY try hard enough they can correlate your activities back to you.
savethefuture
Unfortunately all this leads to self censorship and adds fear into speaking freely and doing as you please, but adding additional lays of protection will make it more difficult for them to discover things about you. But there is no total safety or total privacy on the internet ever.
wazanator
Have you looked into Tor? If you don't want to use a VPN that's an alternative.
deftnerd
I was using AT&T gigabit in Austin, TX. Their regular price included them monitoring all my internet traffic to profile my browsing habits. I could pay another $30 or $40 a month for my privacy to stay intact (at least they promised that they would respect my privacy if I paid extra).

Rather than spending that money, I just rented a small server at a colo in town and set up a VPN server. I then configured my router so all traffic went through the VPN. All traffic through AT&T's networks remained encrypted through the VPN. It also had the benefit of hiding my real IP address from nosy sites.

Using a VPN service would also be acceptable, just make sure they have enough bandwidth.