Unfortunately, if you’re a privacy-conscious user, we hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your online activities aren’t anonymous.
Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) can easily see all of your online activities and the websites you’re visiting. They can see everything from the files you download to your emails and passwords.
Your ISP is the company that allows you to access the internet, and they keep track of your browsing history and activities, all under the guise of wanting to improve the user experience.
The good news is that there are a couple of tips and tricks you can implement to prevent ISPs from snooping your online activities, and we’ll explore all of these in this guide, so if you’re ready, let’s get started.
Why Do ISPs Track Your Online Activities?
There are many different reasons why ISPs track your browsing history. Sometimes, they do it for advertisement purposes and collect data on you based on your interests, preferences, and demographics. Advertisers can use this data to deliver targeted ads.
They can also track your browsing history and online behavior to identify and reduce security risks, including phishing attempts, malware infections, or other illegal activities. The monitoring allows them to comply with the regulations and protect their network infrastructure and users.
In some situations, ISPs may be required by the law to track and retain data based on the user’s online activities for different purposes, such as law enforcement investigations or compliance with government regulations.
ISPs can also track your online activities to throttle your connection if they detect that you’re doing something consuming a lot of bandwidth. They can use this situation to charge more for better quality services and a fast internet connection speed.
Why Should I Hide My Browsing History From ISPs?
You’d want to conceal your online activities from your ISPs for several reasons. Some of the primary reasons include:
1) Privacy Concerns
Your browsing history has a lot of personal information about you, including your interests, activities, and other sensitive data, such as your login credentials and financial information. By keeping this information private, you can protect your confidential data from getting exploited.
2) Prevent Profiling
ISPs can create user profiles based on the information from your browsing history. The profiling is done for various purposes, including marketing. Still, it can also have profound implications, such as being used to discriminate against you or influence decisions about things like job opportunities.
3) Avoid Targeted Advertising
ISPs can track your browsing activities and sell your information to advertisers, who can then use it to target you with personalized ads. Hiding your browsing history helps reduce the amount of targeted advertising you see.
4) Freedom of Expression
Keeping your browsing history private ensures you can browse the web freely without worrying about your activities being monitored, observed, or censored by ISPs and other third parties.
Additionally, by keeping your browsing history private, your confidential data would not be able to get exposed or exploited by malicious actors for various purposes, like identity theft, cyberattacks, or fraud.
Smart Ways To Hide Your Browsing History From ISPs
Now that you’re aware of why ISPs track your online activities in the first place and the importance of keeping your online activities private, we can now explore some of the valuable ways that you can prevent ISPs and other third parties from ever tracking your browsing history or snooping on your online activities. These include:
1) Using a VPN
Use feature-rich VPN to help you hide your online activities. A VPN (Virtual Private Network) masks your IP address and encrypts your internet traffic, keeping your data safe and secure from ISPs and other third parties since all your sensitive and confidential data is routed through a secure and encrypted VPN tunnel. This means that ISPs and other third parties cannot decipher or intercept your sensitive data.
VPNs also allow you to bypass ISP throttling. You can easily connect to a server from a different location; this way, your ISP will not be able to track how much bandwidth you’re using since the VPN has assigned you an IP address from a different location.
2) Use The Tor Browser
The Tor browser has been specifically created for anonymous browsing. It allows you to anonymize your internet traffic by routing it through a series of volunteer-run servers, encrypting it at each step. This makes it difficult for ISPs to track your online activities.
However, it is essential to note that the Tor browser is slower and may not be suited for bandwidth-consuming activities like streaming.
3) Use HTTPS
HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It protects sensitive information transmitted over the internet, such as your login credentials, personal data, and credit card numbers. It makes use of cryptographic protocols like SSL or TLS to encrypt data.
When you visit a HTTPS website, your browser establishes a secure connection with the server hosting the website. The secure connection ensures that any data transmitted between the browser and the website is encrypted and cannot be intercepted or deciphered by ISPs and other third parties.
4) DNS Encryption
Secure your DNS queries using encrypted DNS services like DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over TLS (DoT). This prevents your ISP from intercepting or logging your DNS requests, which reveal the websites you visit and your online activities.
Many web browsers now support DNS encryption by default, which can help you conceal your online activities from your ISP.
Conclusion
If you value your privacy and want to prevent third parties from gaining access to your sensitive and confidential data, then hiding your online activities from your ISP would be a great place to start. You also have personal responsibility when it comes to the protection of your data.
By encrypting your data using a VPN and only using HTTPS websites, you can be assured that your data is in safe hands and that your ISP, advertisers, malicious actors, and other third parties will not be able to take advantage of it.
This guide mentions additional safety measures you can implement so that your data remains encrypted and is not exploited.
