Happy Tuesday!
If you want to go online, you have to use an Internet Service Provider, or ISP.
And unfortunately, in the U.S. your ISP has the right to sell your personal information, including your browser history, to any individual or corporation.
Here’s the number one way you can say “No!”
Use a high-quality VPN.
— Anthony Collette
Founder, Loistava Information Security
Every one one of us gains access to the Internet through an Internet Service Provider, or ISP.
In the U.S. your ISP has the right to sell your personal information, including your browser history, to any individual or corporation. They can sell your information 100 times a day, every day, if they choose. This is a significant source of revenue for ISPs. There’s a long line of buyers, frantically waving wads of $100 bills in the air, eagerly lining up to outbid each other in order to acquire this information about you every day.
Many people find this offensive, and have lost trust in their ISP to keep their personal information private. We can’t say the ISPs of the World are Digital Kleptos™, stealing our private information. Each of us agreed to this deal when we signed up for Internet service. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it! Or simply go along with it.
What can you do about it?
Is there any way to shout “NO!” and make it count?
One effective solution is to use a high-quality consumer Virtual Private Network (VPN). A VPN acts as a kind of tunnel between your computer or phone and the Internet. It masks where your internet traffic is coming from. It hides your browser history from your ISP.
Adding a virtual private network to your online experience requires you to choose your VPN service carefully, since you’re choosing to trust your VPN provider more than your ISP.
A Transfer of Trust
You say to your ISP: “I don’t trust you to keep my personal information private.”
You say to your VPN Provider: “I trust you to keep my personal information private.”
When you use a high-quality consumer VPN, you express your disagreement with the careless sale of your personal information.
But using a high-quality consumer VPN is also a potent and effective protest, because you deny the ISP the very product they want to sell — your browser history.
What Can Go Wrong?
All VPNs are not created equal.
Like many consumer products and services, there is an enormous variety in the quality of VPNs. Unlike a t-shirt or a pair of shoes, quality issues around VPNs are highly technical and difficult for typical consumers to evaluate. Fortunately, well-known and respected researchers in the online security industry have provided suggestions and recommendations.
In December of 2021, Consumer Reports published their analysis and recommendations for consumer VPNs written by Yael Grauer and Steve Blair. Three VPN providers — Mullvad, IVPN, and Mozilla VPN — stood out for their strong privacy and security protections:
As of December 2024, the Freedom of the Press Foundation published their 2025 journalist’s digital security checklist, written by Davis Erin Anderson and Dr. Martin Shelton. They specifically recommend Mullvad, IVPN, Proton VPN, and Surfshark. (Navigate to: Protect your research with secure browsing | Next Steps):
Other than being a paid subscriber to one of these VPN providers, I have no other connection to the VPN industry.
As an empowered consumer, it might make sense to try out a free version from one of these VPN providers first, just to get a sense of how they work and how they fit into your everyday online experience.
There are many positive uses for VPNs, although some state lawmakers want to ban them completely.
Does your ISP’s casual disregard for your privacy bother you?
“NO!” is a complete sentence.
PRIVACY UPDATE: Americans spend billions of dollars each year on commercial VPN services, many offered by foreign-headquartered companies that route traffic through servers located overseas. These services are widely advertised as privacy tools, including by elements of the US government itself, but Americans may be inadvertently waiving the privacy protections they're entitled to under the law.
It’s possible that Americans who use commercial VPN services risk being treated as foreigners under United States surveillance law — a classification that would strip them of constitutional protections against warrantless government spying. When a person’s location is unknown, they are presumed to be a non-US person unless there is specific information to the contrary.
This “foreignness” presumption means Americans on foreign VPN servers could be exposed not just to targeted spying but also to what lawmakers describe as “bulk, indiscriminate surveillance of foreigners' communications.”
Does this mean that a U.S. citizen, here in the U.S., using the Apple or Google free VPN, would be recognized as a citizen because their location is known?
Lawmakers recently requested that intelligence agencies “clarify what, if anything, American consumers can do to ensure they receive the privacy protections they are entitled to under the law and the US Constitution.”
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Looking forward to connecting again next week.
— Anthony Collette