Protecting Your Online Data

Advertisement for Norton VPN Dad forwarded an email he got from Symantec today. The subject line was “Breaking: New legislation affects your online privacy” and went on to suggest he could subscribe to their “Norton WiFi Privacy” product to stop his Internet Service Provider from selling his browsing data.

My take is that he should save his money. This is just Symantec doing some very opportunistic, and cynical, marketing. The place where a VPN is most valuable is when you’re using a network you don’t know whether to trust (e.g. the free WiFi at your neighborhood sub shop).

For now at least, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and probably others are making a big deal about how they’re not collecting/selling your web browsing behavior (though they’re certainly leaving room to change that once the furor dies down — they did after all spend a huge amount of money lobbying against those rules).

Even without VPN, when you visit a web site that uses HTTPS (and more than half of the web does now), your internet provider can’t tell what you did there. They can certainly tell that you visited, but because it’s https:// instead of http://, they can’t tell what specific pages you visited.

USA Today had a good article about some ways to protect your online privacy. Subscribing to a VPN service wasn’t one of them.