What Does Your ISP Know About You?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
1,331 words · ~6 min read
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It's long been true that if you want to participate in modern society, you have
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to give up some degree of your privacy. And at this point, I'm not even sure
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that moving off the grid to a jungle somewhere and living off the land would
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actually insulate you entirely from the watchful eyes of the powers that be. And
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perhaps there's no better illustration of this than the amount of trust that
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people are expected to place in their internet service provider or ISP. I
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mean, just think about how much of your personal data concerning everything from
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your financials to your vacation planning to your love life is flowing
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through that tube that goes from your house off to some other mysterious land
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of long corridors, closed office doors, and networking equipment that grants you
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access to the internet. So, just how much of this is your ISP really keeping
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tabs on? Well, it's probably not that surprising that since the function of an
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ISP is to connect you to the websites and services that you want to access,
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they know, at least in a general sense, the IP addresses and the sites that
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you're visiting because DNS requests, which you can learn more about up here,
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are unencrypted. That means that they can see the domains that you're going to
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like youtube.com or linesttechtips.com but not necessarily which specific pages
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on those domains like gei us/ capital d
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lowercase mdk uppercase j lowercase a.
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These IP addresses are just one form of
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simple trackable metadata, which is a catch-all phrase for information other
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than the content itself, with other examples being email addresses,
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timestamps, and port numbers. So, your ISP will know you visited Facebook last
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Thursday at 3 p.m., but won't have access to the encrypted data like your
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login credentials, who you talked to, and what you said. Now, let's talk about
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unencrypted sites or sending and receiving unencrypted communications.
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When you do this, your ISP can actually see specifics about your activity,
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including the exact content on those web pages or messages. Yikes. They can even
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make educated guesses as to some of what
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you're up to on encrypted sites. So for example, looking at individual packet
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size, routing patterns and timing, they can piece together details like
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recipient of a message or the length of a password and get a pretty good picture
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of what your online life is without relying on elite hackors or the NSA to
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break the encryption. So by this point, you might be a little nervous. Even if
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you're not some notorious cyber criminal, I think it's fair to say that
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the vast majority of us have done something online that we'd sort of
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rather not share with the rest of the world. But it's not all doom and gloom.
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Odds are there isn't someone at your ISP just munching on some popcorn and going
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through your private stream of internet packets. But that doesn't mean that this
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isn't a concern or that they're not just logging all of that information anyways
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for later use. The upsetting thing for a lot of people specifically is the
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potential for ISPs to sell this information to advertisers or other more
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nefarious partners. It's kind of like how Google delivers advertising for
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products that they think you might like based on your browsing history, except
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that in the case of an online service, it's often easier to opt out or just
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avoid using it compared to literally your internet
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connection. There's a good reason to be uncomfortable. Once that information
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gets sold, there isn't much telling what some unscrupulous advertiser would do
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with it. Even if they aren't selling it directly to email spammers, there's no
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guarantee that your information will remain out of the hands of malcontents.
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Look at how many major data breaches are in the news these days. It happens all
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the time. However, there is a bit of good news for those that are concerned
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about privacy. More and more websites, especially large popular ones, are
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encrypting connections by default thanks to services like Let's Encrypt. And
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additionally, ISPs don't save this dirt they have on you forever. Most of them
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keep it for about 2 years at most. That's not to say that they don't just
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sell it every two years, but either way,
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there might not be a complete picture of your digital life forever available at
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any individual point in time. And you might also be using multiple ISPs which
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is becoming common as many people even unintentionally in most cases use one
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provider at home, another at work and a third for cellular data and so on. And
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beyond that, if you do want to get super serious about privacy and limit what
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your ISP knows about you, using a reputable VPN service with good security
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that doesn't log user activity can help
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a lot. A VPN creates a secure tunnel between your device and whatever you're
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connecting to. And some of them even secure your DNS requests, meaning that
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theoretically your ISP could end up knowing virtually nothing about your
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online life, which is awesome. Just make sure the VPN service is one that you can
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trust because all the same metadata will be flowing through them and they could
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theoretically just be exactly as malicious with it. So, that would be
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bad. But why do they have to keep track of this information at all? Can't they
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just leave us alone? Well, believe it or not, ISPs aren't just tracking you to
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make a quick buck. Identifying patterns and user behavior helps them with
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traffic management to make your connection run more quickly and reliably
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and also helps them protect users from cyber attacks and malware. So, it's not
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like there's no benefit to this user
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data collection. But even so, no one would blame you if you develop trust
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issues like me in this brave new world of exploding phones and fake dating
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profiles. It's good to be safe out there. Tunnel BearVPN allows you to
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tunnel into up to 20 different countries, making it so that you seem as
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if you're from that country when you're using and browsing the internet. They
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have easytouse apps for iOS, Android, PC, and Mac. And they also have a Chrome
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extension. Just choose the country that you want to tunnel to in the app. Turn
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tunnel bear on and watch as your bear tunnels your internet connection to that
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new location. When you turn Tunnel Bear on, two things happen. Your connection
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gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption and your public IP address
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gets switched so you show up as if you're in well that country. Tunnel Bear
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lets you bypass all the really annoying details of setting up certain other VPNs
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for personal use by not needing to mess around with port configurations, DNS, or
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any other router settings. Tunnel Bear handles all of that for you in the background. It's easy. They also don't
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log user activity. You can try out Tunnel BearVear VPN with 500 megabytes
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of free data and no credit card required today. And if you choose to get
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unlimited data, you can save 10% by going to
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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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