Everyone deserves a private life. It seems like, online, that’s becoming harder and harder to find. You might choose to share all kinds of things about yourself on Facebook amongst your friends but, so long as your profile is private, that shouldn’t mean it’s open season for the details of your life. Unfortunately, on the internet, there’s a lot more data about you than just what you put on Facebook. Everything you put up there, every message, every website visit, every online purchase, every Google search, can get logged. For that reason, more and more people are turning to VPNs.
Why it matters
The majority of data is collected in order to be sold to companies so they can build their leads and target their marketing. Some instances involve governments using ISP information to track down criminals. So, why would it worry you enough to use a virtual private network from Securethoughts? Think about it. What if at some point you’ve watched copyrighted material you maybe shouldn’t have had access to? What if you’re using sites you would rather your family didn’t know? What if, for instance, you were looking up the symptoms of a condition you didn’t want your family or, even worse, your insurance provider looking at? The ‘nothing to hide’ excuse doesn’t work. Everyone should have a right to look up information without worrying about what consequences might happen because it’s being tracked.
Is Google your friend?
One of the most worrying culprits at the moment is Google. It’s undeniably helpful, but it’s also one of the biggest data hogging businesses in the online world. Every search and every click you make from Google is captured and sold to businesses. For many people, Google’s a useful tool that can help them combine personal preferences across a suite of tools. But it also has the most comprehensive account of all your online browsing habits. For instance, think about where you get your cold calls from. If you were to ever, out of curiosity, look at details on how to claim after a car accident, you can expect to get frequent calls from companies that do just that, trying to get you to press a claim for an accident that never actually happened. That’s why the juggernaut is seeing a competitor arising in DuckDuckGo. Few people might have imagined that another search engine could prove a competitor to Google, but the privacy policies of DuckDuckGo are making it a valuable tool for people who don’t want even more businesses having their data.
Why it’s time to get concerned
The fight for online privacy has come to a boiling point, now. The House of Representatives has recently passed a law that allows ISPs to sell your data even more widely. This in effect means that anyone can buy anyone’s data. Even VPNs might be helpless in stopping the free trade of your data. When everyone can potentially see every click you’ve made online, the potential dangers become obvious. We can expect more invasive and aggressive advertising related to the things you want to be kept private.
You might not be doing anything that requires you to hide your browsing and your ISP might not have nefarious plans for the data they collect on you. However, that doesn’t change the fact that everyone has a right to privacy and you have a right to protect yours.
