It's long been true that if you want to participate in modern society, you have
to give up some degree of your privacy. And at this point, I'm not even sure
that moving off the grid to a jungle somewhere and living off the land would
actually insulate you entirely from the watchful eyes of the powers that be. And
perhaps there's no better illustration of this than the amount of trust that
people are expected to place in their internet service provider or ISP. I
mean, just think about how much of your personal data concerning everything from
your financials to your vacation planning to your love life is flowing
through that tube that goes from your house off to some other mysterious land
of long corridors, closed office doors, and networking equipment that grants you
access to the internet. So, just how much of this is your ISP really keeping
tabs on? Well, it's probably not that surprising that since the function of an
ISP is to connect you to the websites and services that you want to access,
they know, at least in a general sense, the IP addresses and the sites that
you're visiting because DNS requests, which you can learn more about up here,
are unencrypted. That means that they can see the domains that you're going to
like youtube.com or linesttechtips.com but not necessarily which specific pages
on those domains like gei us/ capital d
lowercase mdk uppercase j lowercase a.
These IP addresses are just one form of
simple trackable metadata, which is a catch-all phrase for information other
than the content itself, with other examples being email addresses,
timestamps, and port numbers. So, your ISP will know you visited Facebook last
Thursday at 3 p.m., but won't have access to the encrypted data like your
login credentials, who you talked to, and what you said. Now, let's talk about
unencrypted sites or sending and receiving unencrypted communications.
When you do this, your ISP can actually see specifics about your activity,
including the exact content on those web pages or messages. Yikes. They can even
make educated guesses as to some of what
you're up to on encrypted sites. So for example, looking at individual packet
size, routing patterns and timing, they can piece together details like
recipient of a message or the length of a password and get a pretty good picture
of what your online life is without relying on elite hackors or the NSA to
break the encryption. So by this point, you might be a little nervous. Even if
you're not some notorious cyber criminal, I think it's fair to say that
the vast majority of us have done something online that we'd sort of
rather not share with the rest of the world. But it's not all doom and gloom.
Odds are there isn't someone at your ISP just munching on some popcorn and going
through your private stream of internet packets. But that doesn't mean that this
isn't a concern or that they're not just logging all of that information anyways
for later use. The upsetting thing for a lot of people specifically is the
potential for ISPs to sell this information to advertisers or other more
nefarious partners. It's kind of like how Google delivers advertising for
products that they think you might like based on your browsing history, except
that in the case of an online service, it's often easier to opt out or just
avoid using it compared to literally your internet
connection. There's a good reason to be uncomfortable. Once that information
gets sold, there isn't much telling what some unscrupulous advertiser would do
with it. Even if they aren't selling it directly to email spammers, there's no
guarantee that your information will remain out of the hands of malcontents.
Look at how many major data breaches are in the news these days. It happens all
the time. However, there is a bit of good news for those that are concerned
about privacy. More and more websites, especially large popular ones, are
encrypting connections by default thanks to services like Let's Encrypt. And
additionally, ISPs don't save this dirt they have on you forever. Most of them
keep it for about 2 years at most. That's not to say that they don't just
sell it every two years, but either way,
there might not be a complete picture of your digital life forever available at
any individual point in time. And you might also be using multiple ISPs which
is becoming common as many people even unintentionally in most cases use one
provider at home, another at work and a third for cellular data and so on. And
beyond that, if you do want to get super serious about privacy and limit what
your ISP knows about you, using a reputable VPN service with good security
that doesn't log user activity can help
a lot. A VPN creates a secure tunnel between your device and whatever you're
connecting to. And some of them even secure your DNS requests, meaning that
theoretically your ISP could end up knowing virtually nothing about your
online life, which is awesome. Just make sure the VPN service is one that you can
trust because all the same metadata will be flowing through them and they could
theoretically just be exactly as malicious with it. So, that would be
bad. But why do they have to keep track of this information at all? Can't they
just leave us alone? Well, believe it or not, ISPs aren't just tracking you to
make a quick buck. Identifying patterns and user behavior helps them with
traffic management to make your connection run more quickly and reliably
and also helps them protect users from cyber attacks and malware. So, it's not
like there's no benefit to this user
data collection. But even so, no one would blame you if you develop trust
issues like me in this brave new world of exploding phones and fake dating
profiles. It's good to be safe out there. Tunnel BearVPN allows you to
tunnel into up to 20 different countries, making it so that you seem as
if you're from that country when you're using and browsing the internet. They
have easytouse apps for iOS, Android, PC, and Mac. And they also have a Chrome
extension. Just choose the country that you want to tunnel to in the app. Turn
tunnel bear on and watch as your bear tunnels your internet connection to that
new location. When you turn Tunnel Bear on, two things happen. Your connection
gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption and your public IP address
gets switched so you show up as if you're in well that country. Tunnel Bear
lets you bypass all the really annoying details of setting up certain other VPNs
for personal use by not needing to mess around with port configurations, DNS, or
any other router settings. Tunnel Bear handles all of that for you in the background. It's easy. They also don't
log user activity. You can try out Tunnel BearVear VPN with 500 megabytes
of free data and no credit card required today. And if you choose to get
unlimited data, you can save 10% by going to
tunnel.com/inus. All right, guys. Like the video if you liked it. Dislike if you disliked it. Get subscribed so you
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