Protecting your Privacy
Contents
Internet Security
Its a big deal these days, whether its companies tracking your browsing habits to serve up adverts or the government trying to snoop on your activity under the bullshit pretense that it protects you from 'terrorists', when in reality its an infringement on Article 12 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states…
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks"
…there are any number of reasons you might wish to improve the security and way in which you use the Internet. Its a big topic, so I've made these notes as I fumble my way through the process in the hope they are useful to others.
Overview and Definitions
A lot of new terms…
- Certificates documents issued by VPN providers to users allowing them to connect securely to their network.
- Free Open Source Software (FOSS) software that anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change in any way and for which the source code is available.
- Gateway] a server through which you connect from one network to another.
- Internet Service Provider (ISP) is who you pay for an internet connection. Sometimes this will be whoever you have your mobile phone with.
- OpenVPN Free Open Source Software (FOSS) implementing Virtual Private Network (VPN).
- TOR is a network that anonymoises your browsing by routing it through a network of public servers.
- Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a private network that you can connect to over the internet. Traffic then passes between you and the private network without anyone in between being able to see what is passing between you. This in essence means
Virtual Private Networks (VPN)
This should be your first step in improving your internet security. Your ISP is capable of logging all of the internet traffic that passes in/out of your house, whether you are browsing the web, torrenting sites, making SSH connections to remote servers, it all passes through your modem and the connection your ISP provides. As of writing there are proposals in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill by the UK Government to force ISPs to log a years worth of customers browsing habits at the level of the domain you visit (i.e. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ but not http://www.bbc.co.uk/news). By using a VPN your ISP only sees you making a connection to the VPN and not what you then subsequently browse whilst connected to the VPN.
Choosing a VPN service
There are lots to choose from, I'm no expert, so read this detailed article (2014 version) on TorrentFreak who asked a whole host of VPN services to describe their approach to anonymity. A few shortlisted ones to check out are...
...but read the TorrentFreak article and the current policies on the providers website and decide for yourself, as prices and policies can vary over time.
