clearing browser history

I already get targeted ads. I just bought a book yesterday on Amazon for coin magic and today I get ads on Facebook with DVDs on coin magic. That happens all thew time. The year I went to Hawaii I saw ads for Hawaii on every site I visited.

I don’t know how it all works but I think in this day and age you have to come to peace with the fact that there is no real privacy anymore.

Yes–it makes me angry. Yes–I think it’s wrong. Besides VPNs you have companies like Lifelock and others all making money by protecting your privacy. Who thought you’d have to pay for that? Is privacy not a right of freedom? The right is always arguing this and that about what rights are and aren’t. Apparently you have a right to own a gun but not a right to healthcare. What about privacy rights?

And I think people are too exhausted by the whole thing to really get worked up about it. They just assume that nothing is private anymore. They assume that at some point they’ll be hacked. Or that the government is watching them. Or that companies will sell their information. Trying to fight that battle seems impossible. I posted articles about this on Facebook and the response was….crickets. I get that about a lot of political things really but this should be non-partisan. Everyone should care–no matter what your party.

I thought about VPNs but I really do not want to pay for them and I don’t even trust them, really. Someone always has your information–even if it’s the VPN. And with all the sophisticated hackers today–if they want it–they’ll get it.

I can see all kinds of problems if, for example, some prospective employer buys the information and doesn’t like your political leanings. You may be pro-union. What about an insurance company who sees that you’ve been reading about different medical conditions?

In the future nothing will be private at all.

There are great things about the computer age–but there is also a downside.

We are paying with our privacy.

I bumped into a pretty good article on the subject, but there are many, and not all IT folks agree on this stuff.

How ISPs can sell your Web history—and how to stop them How the Senate’s vote to kill privacy rules affects you. Jon Brodkin – Mar 24, 2017 4:20 pm UTC

Excerpt:

VPNs, Tor, and HTTPS: Preserving your privacy

To protect your browsing history from your ISP, you need to encrypt your Internet traffic, and there are three primary methods of accomplishing that: VPN services, Tor, and HTTPS.

“That’s basically it,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Technologist Jeremy Gillula told Ars. “Those are the three ways you can encrypt [your browsing] so that the ISP can’t see it.”

Your ISP can see that you’re using a VPN or Tor, “but that’s all they’ll see,” Gillula said.

With a VPN, you’re paying a company to encrypt all of your Web traffic and prevent others from tracing your Web browsing back to your IP address. You’re trusting that the VPN company will not keep logs of your activities and that it will generally be more respectful of your privacy than your ISP.

Readers have been asking us for a definitive list of the best VPN services. But as we covered last year, this is really an impossible task. You can find out whether a VPN provider promises not to keep logs of your Internet activities, but there’s no way to verify whether the VPN provider actually keeps logs, Gillula said.

A VPN provider would see exactly what your ISP would see, but “in some cases, that may be better than trusting your ISP, because your ISP may just straight out say, ‘we’re going to be snooping through your browsing history,'” Gillula said.

For guidelines on what to expect and what not to expect from VPN services, read our feature from last year. We also discussed VPNs and other technologies in this beginner’s guide to boosting your privacy and security online.

While each VPN is operated by a single provider, Tor is a distributed network that tries to preserve anonymity by routing traffic through a series of relays.

“When you use the Tor software, your IP address remains hidden and it appears that your connection is coming from the IP address of a Tor exit relay, which can be anywhere in the world,” the EFF explains.

Tor is not without vulnerabilities. But generally speaking, while operators of Tor exit nodes “can see traffic going back and forth, they wouldn’t be able to trace it back to you,” Gillula said. They’d know that someone is going to the websites you’re visiting, but they “wouldn’t know that it originated from your home IP address.” Tor is thus “a little more privacy preserving than the VPN,” he said.
Further Reading
Ars announces HTTPS by default (finally)

VPNs have an advantage over Tor in ease of use if you want to configure your router to tunnel all of your traffic through the VPN, Gillula said.

“You can do that with Tor, but that takes a little more tech savvy than firing up the Tor browser bundle,” which only encrypts traffic in and out of the browser, rather than throughout your home, he said. But there are Tor-enabled routers, which we have reviewed in the past.

Finally, there is HTTPS, which if present in your URL bar indicates that your connection to a particular website is encrypted. As we discussed earlier, your ISP can’t see what you do on an HTTPS-enabled website. For example, the ISP knows when you visit https://arstechnica.com, but it doesn’t see which articles you’re reading.

The HTTPS Everywhere browser extension offered by EFF and The Tor Project provides greater protection on websites that offer only limited support for encryption via HTTPS. However, “it only upgrades your connection if the website supports [HTTPS], and then only if it’s in our list of websites that support HTTPS,” Gillula said. If the website doesn’t support HTTPS at all, you’re out of luck.

Turning on your Web browser’s private or incognito mode will not prevent ISPs from seeing your Internet activity. Google, for example, says that Chrome’s incognito mode prevents the Chrome browser itself from saving the sites that you visit, but does not stop ISPs and websites from seeing which websites you’ve visited.