Some privacy-conscious folks are already doing that—but many aren’t. If you want to keep your ISP from looking over your shoulder for data to sell to advertisers, here are three relatively simple actions you can take to get started.1. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s HTTPS Everywhere browser extension is one of the first things you should install. This extension requires that all website connections to your browser occur using SSL/TLS encryption...
2. Your next step is to subscribe to a paid virtual private network service—not a free one that collects your data and sells it to third parties for analytics, or uses ads to support its free service, because that would negate the entire point of all this...
3. The Domain Name System is how your computer translates a human readable website name, such as NYTimes.com, into a machine-friendly numerical Internet Protocol address. It’s like the telephone book of the Internet.
The problem is that your PC is usually configured to use your ISP’s DNS, which means your ISP sees all your browser requests. VPNs typically configure your PC to use their DNS, and there is usually a DNS leak protection feature that makes sure your PC doesn’t ignore the VPN and use your default DNS settings.Nevertheless, to be doubly sure you’re not using your ISP’s DNS, it’s a good idea to set your PC to use a third-party DNS provider such as OpenDNS... more
