Your ISP Is Tracking Every Website You Visit – 5 Simple Ways To Undo It

There are many ways that privacy today is no longer as private as it seems. This is someone, somewhere who can make your privacy seem vulnerable. The technology, software, and processes of today are no longer prone to have fixed-paced security. The internet service provider is one such entity that can breach your privacy. But, when it comes to keeping it private, there are many steps that you can take to achieve that.

There are ways to keep your privacy from marketing and other companies that you interact with online such as the “Do Not Track” which helps to tell websites that you are not interested in their ads or giving your information. You can also opt of tracking cookies and other technologies used when advertising such as using email to streamline people who search for certain products. However, how do you stop ISPs from tracking your history and searches? First, however, you need to understand why it is necessary for the ISP to keep track and what they do with this information. For example, you cannot go about using the HughesNet Gen5 to access torrents or censored content without the ISP knowing who might even end up blocking your service. Companies that are well formed, intend to keep within the bound of laws as HughesNet would. This is also because companies are accountable by the government if activities like these lead to disruption in the society.

Read on to learn some interesting things about why is your data being tracked by the Internet Service Providers.

What is ISP Tracking really?

The internet service provider tracking is when the ISP monitors what you; the consumers are doing on the internet. The ISP then analyzes traffic and checks if it is flowing on the wrong website or the dark web for the wrong purposes like warfare or hacking.

What Data is your ISP Tracking or Collecting about You?

Information and Information. This is what the ISP or companies are collecting. It is in short, a war on who has more information at the end of the day. The type of data collected depends on the terms and conditions arranged by the ISP, the retention and data laws also matter. However, we have collected an overview of what the ISP might collect, store, analyze, and process. 

• The website URL’s
• The pages visited
• Logging In and Off the web
• How much time is spent on web pages or a website
• The files, images, videos, and anything else downloaded from the web
• The browsing and search history
• The unencrypted communications
• Any information or surfing on unencrypted websites

Yes, this means almost everything that you had been doing and are doing is known by the ISP and monitored. The question is why though?

Why does your ISP Track Your Data?

So, the question would be the reason for all this monitoring is. Once you find out, you will find ways to undo this.

The main reasons why ISPs do this are:

To Sell Information for Profit

The government has allowed some companies to use information; most of it is consensual, such as when you sign for the terms and agreements and consent for companies like cookies. This data collected entails health information, geo-location, web browsing history, other financial information, app usage history. The people in the US would be able to make $240/year if they were to sell their information, which is used by large companies to strategize for advertising or selling.

To Monitor Torrent Online Activities

Torrent usage is considered to be a taboo among many countries and governments can charge heavy fines if laws are evaded. ISP keeps a check on this too, where this is banned. Otherwise, it could not be traced back. This is why it is important to monitor activity on torrent websites and control traffic flowing over to the sites through the cutting of services or warnings to the customer. Especially if the content is not safe or comes under community guidelines.

To Follow Data Retention Laws & Enforce Censorship

There are also laws, which permit the ISP to keep a track of data and to know what the people/public is doing with content online. Thus is to monitor wrong activities like passing on information about police to spies, or agencies that collect intelligence about the country. People would not do this on purpose and just might be manipulated to do so. It is also important to control content going to people and them accessing it such as child pornography sites or such. It is also important to control access to content that may disrupt society and its values.

The 5 Simple Ways to Undo the ISP Keeping Your Data are:

• The best way is to use the VPN. This can help you keep your data secure. You can set it up on your router and then all devices accessing it can access the web through the VPN. This in short hides your IP address and encrypt online activities. The ISP can still see you accessing the VPN and knowing how long you were on it.
• Use the HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), which keeps most of your data private but not all. You might also not get all websites with HTTPS or see what website you are connecting to.
• The third option would be to use Tor.You can use this to hide data and encrypt traffic on the internet. However, governments can block Tor; it only helps to block traffic you send over the browser. You have to deal with security captchas and other issues may happen.
• Using a Proxy Server is also another method to block data going to the ISP. This is when your IP address is replaced by the proxy server, however, with no encryption, the proxy server can see your traffic and even the ISP.
• The last method to control some data passing to ISP would be to switch to a Different ISP which explains its terms and conditions vividly and will not hide what information they are tracking.

Wrapping It Up

Out of all the 5, the best is hence using a VPN. The ISP tracking information cannot be fully evaded. Thus, the control and monitoring should be self-analyzed to ensure you do not break any laws.