Of blonde wigs and lost privacy

I'm no biblical prophet but I have sadly seen this coming a long time ago (Online privacy and anonymity are dead. Get over it!).

Now it's official: we lost our privacy forever.

The new legislation recently voted by the Congress allows ISPs to sell your Internet history to whoever wants to buy it, without your knowledge or consent.

Though refraining from political considerations as much as I can, no one capable of summing two and two might not see this is a first step toward an actual Big Brother dictatorship.

 

And let's face it: each one of us has something to hide or something they don't want other people to know, and they have the right to keep it for themselves.

This scenario allows any sort of abuse and cyber-crime. A black hat hacker could easily grab your Internet history in order to smear or blackmail you, or worse.

If we find what happens to Putin's opposers in Russia to be horrible, wait until this scenario won't be sci-fi here any more.

Turning this country into a glass house, where no information about yourself belongs to yourself, can only allow dictatorship.

On the other hand, some activists have quickly turned the tables and they'll try and buy our politicians' history. 

We'll see how they like a taste of their own medicine.

Anyway, I'm used to analyze facts and I want to show you the full impact of what this piece of legislation can cause to our lives and information.

I found online a website that collects information about you from the Internet (social media, search engines, etc)  and presents it in a very effective way, performing also predictions about your possible future, based on this data.

Sites like those are the main reason why I never signed up for Facebook and I never will. In fact, you can start the analysis about yourself in two possible ways: by connecting your Facebook account or by manually entering age and gender.

Of course, if you don't have a Facebook account, results will be much less accurate, like the website itself warns.

I performed the analysis twice (watch the embedded video for more information).

The first time around I didn't provide my actual location and resulting information was less accurate (I resulted to be in London).

The second time I provided my actual location and more information was shown.

Now all the enthusiasts of social media over sharing, Internet of things and stuff like that might be pleased to have information about them such as alcohol consumption, or drug consumption showed all over the place for everyone to see, but I'm not. 

Sadly, this will not stop people from oversharing their insignificant updates all over the Internet. 

Services like Facebook would be worthless without your information: you're the product.

Though they may sometimes be useful, downsides way overweight advantages and, should more people take hold of their lives, this digital dictatorship would abort immediately.

Well, it's time to go to Facebook and spread more worthless content!

Solutions (?)

So what are the solutions we have? Essentially two.

The first one is Tor but is not invulnerable and can be very slow.

Additionally, in this political climate, you might ask for trouble.

Another solution could be VPN services, but don't trust free services.

In fact, such services can leak your information to your ISP and so you think you're anonymous but they can still snoop your traffic.

I performed a test through https://www.dnsleaktest.com/ on a couple of such services and, though my IP address had changed, information resulted to be leaked to Google.

If you see this, it means you're still tracked.

If you really want to use such services, go for paid ones.

These services have another downside as well; certain websites don't work with VPNs, as they are unable to monetize ads when running through these services.

For example, Quora returned a 403 (Forbidden) error, while it loaded fine with my ordinary Internet connection.

I never cared for fame and success at all costs, but this is the case when I'm thankful I'm not famous.

However, I don't know what the future might bring for me and we can't live our lives based on a hope they won't harm us because we don't matter.