Internet Privacy Act. Whats really going on.

Well, there goes the interwebs….. In light of the happenings on capital hill with internet privacy, it seems like its time to go back to reading at the library, and learning to using pager code. Or is it? So before you go smashing hard drives, wiping cache’s, and habitually spam searching the christian science reading room, lets take a peek at whats really going on……

Let us try to peer deeper into the Mississippi river of legality surrounding internet privacy laws. To start with, lets look at the definition internet privacy. Internet privacy is primarily concerned with protecting user information. Your ability to use the Internet without giving any third parties the ability to link the Internet activities to personally-identifiable information of the Internet user.

There have been several attempts to create laws and regulations to protect web users. Most of them fall short, and just muddied the river even further.

* In 1995 the Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) was created under President Clinton. It defined information privacy as “an individual’s claim to control the terms under which personal information–information identifiable to the individual–is acquired, disclosed, and used.
* The Internet Privacy Act popped up during the late 1990s on many sites that engaged in illegal activities. Such activities included the promotion and distribution of “knock-off” materials, or the sharing of music, films, and software. (This act does not really exist)
* The privacy rule for broadband providers was adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in the waning months of the Obama administration. It required telecommunications firms such as Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. to get customers’ permission to market their app and web-browsing history to third parties.

Your privacy comes under fire from several threats online. Aside from the threat of hackers, identity thieves, and data logging viruses that were all aware of, we seem to look the other way when it comes to the apps and social media outlets we use every day. For years, the FTC oversaw consumer privacy on the internet for all types of firms. Then the FCC reclassified internet-service providers as common carriers, as part of its separate net-neutrality rules. These rules require the telecommunications firms to treat all internet traffic equally. That reclassification meant that the FTC lost jurisdiction over the internet-service providers to the FCC. So the FCC set about adopting the privacy rules (which they made up) that Congress has now voted to overturn. In simple terms, Comcast can sell your browsing history to marketers just like Facebook has been doing for years. The reality is that ISP’s have been doing this already, because the Obama-era privacy rule has yet to even come into effect. Don’t think that any of this muddy water shrouds you from prying eyes. The silt that all this has churned up is only a mask for the biggest threat to your online privacy, BIG BROTHER. Not one single piece of legislation passed, keeps this predator from gobbling up your data.

“So how do we get out of this river” you ask?

You can pay for a Virtual Private Network or VPN. I would suggest paying and not using a free one, the free ones have to make their money somewhere. Think about it, your information is valuable and they control it all. Another route could be TOR software. This masks your IP by bouncing you from server to server around the world in order to conceal your location. But it tends to be very slow, you’re better off stocking up on stationary and stamps. TOR also opens you up to the lawless dark-web. There are such nasty critters in that water that even big brother doesn’t like to swim there.“So were screwed” you say. Not quite.

There is a way out of the muddy water out there. It works like a VPN and uses the benefits of TOR like technology. Imagine a anonymous search engine combined with data encryption and IP masking. Nothing will make your online habits completely invisible, but this is damn close. Slip out of the water with the Gibiru anonymous search engine and download the Anonymox Firefox plugin for pure untraceable and uncensored web surfing, the way the web was meant to be.