Is Online Privacy History?

@Linda --- DuckDuckGo is an excellent search engine like Google, Bing & so on. It is not a browser.

What I do love about DuckDuckGo is there are no ads & you basically have all of the sites for what you want to research or read about. Yes, your privacy is taken in to consideration because there are NO ads.

"late days of the Obama administration. ...
To be clear: those new FCC privacy rules never went into effect. Your ISP is free to sell your browsing history, and always has been. "
That was a scam to make it look like there was action.

To quote another internet blogger "99 percent of us are just not that interesting"

Here is a probable scenario: our online surfing and searches; along with the social media sites we frequent and the video streams we watch are stored, filtered, and sold to employers, insurance companies, retailers, banks and online lending (currently estimated at 10%), and anyone else who wants the information. This will directly affect your income and expenses (such as insurance rates.)

Our children and grandchildren might be prevented from jobs, insurance, colleges, loans, ect. because of their surfing habits.

//Monitor those kids!//

In the meantime, this is estimated to give ISP's an extra $35 - 60 billion a year in revenue; not to mention the hackers. Hackread.com says it all: security is a myth.

There's gold in that information!

Bob, In addition to WebRTC leaking IPs, the DNS can leak as well. DNS leaks can be checked at http://dnsleak.com/. Another good security check site is https://ipleak.net/

To quote another internet blogger "99 percent of us are just not that interesting"

---

So why does the Gov. spend so much time and money tracking and recording all of our online activities?

"Not THAT interesting" isn't the same as "Not interesting at all"

Google "create your own vpn" if you want true privacy.

Remember that an ad blocker blocks poisoned ads as well as the "good" ones. I'm an IT guy for a 3-campus private school; the last 4 infections we had ALL came from poisoned advertising - and now we run an ad blocker. EVERYWHERE. (Same as I have long done at home.) Until website owners and legitimate advertisers develop a way to prevent drive-by / infected ads, the blocker stays in place.

Sorry, internet, but until you clean up your act I can't trust your "economic support" system.

I use Ixquick. It does the same thing as duckduck. I never use google for a search on my phone or at home.
Bottom line, I think, is you can't assume privacy anywhere. Just varying degrees of collection. I have Tor and may try that for a while. F the man is my motto.

Another highly informative article.
I understand your opposition to ad blockers, however, I find them truly indispensable.
It would be fine if ads merely trickled through here and there, but sadly, we are getting a tsunami of ads. Many are animated and too distracting to read the text on the web page they share.
As well, they make pages so slow to load.
This ad tsunami will eventually ruin the internet, if it hasn't already.

Good article, Bob! But I have to disagree with you about ad blockers. As a blind guy with some residual sight, I do not want my screen cluttered with ads; as Al has said, a "tsunami" of ads just makes reading my screen more difficult for me. And if I were to use a screen reader (JAWS, Window Eyes, System Access, etc.), it would read the entire screen; I'd be unable to skip the ads. Hence Adblock is my friend.

The above sounds rather hypocritical, considering I used to teach marketing! If I were still teaching, I wonder how I'd address the issue to an introductory marketing class...

Yet, when Manning, Assange and Snowden did to the government, what the government does to us, it's a totally different story.

@Dick; if you use firefox or opera as your browser try the Reader View extension. It installs a clickable icon in the browser address bar. When clicked on it opens a web page showing only the pertinent text or pictures. And opens the page zoomed. Click it again to view the page normally. Prob'ly works with chrome browser too.

The problem was being addressed by Obama, as well as net neutrality. Now Trump will set us back 20 years, at least. Still think there was no difference between the candidates? If you didn't vote for Hillary, you lost your right to complain.

A good search engine is startpage.com that send searches through google. The also have another sesrch site called ixquick.com. there are a lot of tricks including hacks to stop WebRTC at http://www.privacyrools.io.

I remember the old days with those dang banner ads that scrolled across your browser as you tried to read your mail. Yes I have Adblock Plus and have been using it for years. Websites like yours Bob I unblock because the ads here don't interfere with my reading your articles. There was one site I really liked and I turned off Adblock Plus and all kinds of moving ads and videos came up and actually caused my browser to hang; I don't go there anymore. This is the reason ad blockers were created... when sites became too greedy and placed a whole lot of ads on their pages. It's their own fault, not the user. I whitelisted your site and many others, but some I continue to block.

The way i see it: If companies are allowed to sell our information then we should be receiving a royalty amount for each transaction. If they use my information then I should be paid for it. Better yet outlaw lobbyist so that government will have to listen to the consumer for a change.

I've been using computers since they first came out for the home market, and my first online social site was Quantum Link. (Like MmeMoxie, I'm 73.) I have always considered the internet as one huge community billboard. I don't think 90% of what I do at all is of particular interest to others, but I assume that anything I do online might be viewed somehow by someone, much as the old "party" phone lines didn't guarantee privacy in a phone call. I love computers; I loved using them for business; I love using them for play; but I don't expect 100% privacy when I use them, and if I ever have something that important to keep private, I'll remember how to write and mail a letter. Since governments are composed of many individuals who are not very computer savvy, I wish they'd use their own encrypted intranets unlinked to the internet, registered mail, and trusted, vetted couriers (remember those?).

I guess the biggest problem I had (have) with the whole Obama last minute scheme to give further advantage to Google in particular for its collection of data is the picking of winners and losers. Nothing this rule did would actually improve any individuals privacy one iota while stomping a mud hole in Google's competition and allowing them to be even more predatory (and richer) than they already were.

Those of you that use Ad Blockers, could you recommend some good ones? Thanks.

Paid ISP's selling your browsing history is quite different than free search engines making money on targeted ads.That's the difference in this corporate sponsored bill.

Comcast, and other ISP's paid millions to get this passed. Find out how much your Representative received, and let them know your thoughts, and remember them when you vote.

A good ad blocker is AdBlock Plus.

You can whitelist sites if you wish, or just block all the ads.

And if we want to help pay for Bob's brilliant site we can "buy him a snickers bar" ... see the link above these comments if you wish to do so.