What Does Your ISP Know About You?

it's long been known that if you want to participate in modern society you have to give up some degree of your privacy, and at this point I'm not even sure that moving off the grid to a jungle somewhere and living off the land would actually insulate you entirely from the watchful eyes of the powers that be, and perhaps there's no better illustration of this than the amount of trust that people are expected to place in their internet service provider or ISP I mean just think about how much of your personal data concerning everything from your financials to your vacation planning to your love life, its all flowing through that tube that goes from your house soft to some other mysterious land of long corridors closed office doors and networking equipment that grants you access to the Internet so just how much of this is your ISP really keeping tabs on.

well it's probably not that surprising, since the function of an ISP is to connect you to the websites and services that you want to access, they know at least in a general sense the IP addresses and the sites that you're visiting because DNS requests are unencrypted that means that they can see the domains that you're going to, like Steemit.com or Youtube.com but not necessarily which specific pages on those domains like https://steemit.com/@anisj these IP addresses are just one form of simple trackable metadata which is a catch-all phrase for information other than the content itself with other examples being email addresses timestamps and port numbers so your ISP will know you visited Facebook last Thursday at 3 p.m. but won't have access to the encrypted data like your login credentials who you talk to and what you said.
now let's talk about unencrypted sites or sending and receiving unencrypted communications, when you do this your ISP can actually see specifics about your activity including the exact content on those web pages or messages, they can even make educated guesses as to some of what you're up to on encrypted sites so for example looking at individual packet size routing patterns and timing they can piece together details like recipient of a message or the length of a password and get a pretty good picture of what your online life is without relying on hackers or the NSA to break the encryption. so by this point you might be a little nervous even if you're not some notorious cyber criminal I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of us have done something online that we sort of rather not share with the rest of the world but it's not all doom and gloom, odds are there isn't someone at your eyes PE just munching on some popcorn and going through your private stream of Internet packets but that doesn't mean that this isn't a concern or that they're not just logging all of that information anyways for later use. the upsetting thing for a lot of people specifically is the potential for ISPs to sell this information to advertisers or other more nefarious partners it's kind of like how Google delivers advertising for products that they think you might like based on your browsing history, except that in the case of an online service it's often easier to opt out or just avoid using it compared to literally your internet connection. there's a good reason to be uncomfortable once that information gets sold there isn't much telling what some unscrupulous advertiser would do with it, even if they aren't selling it directly to email spammers there's no guarantee that your information will remain out of the hands of malcontents, look at how many major data breaches are in the news these days it happens all the time however there is a bit of good news for those that are concerned about privacy more and more, websites especially large popular ones are encrypting connections by default thanks to services like let's encrypt,and additionally ISPs don't save this dirt they have on you forever most of them keep it for about two years at most, but not to say that they don't just sell it every two years but either way there might not be a complete picture of your digital life forever available at any individual point in time and you might also be using multiple ISPs which is becoming common as many people even unintentionally in most cases use one provider at home another at work and a third for cellular data and so on and beyond that, if you do want to get super serious about privacy and limit what your ISP knows about you using a reputable VPN service with good security that doesn't log user activity can help a lot, a VPN creates a secure tunnel between your device and whatever you're connecting to and some of them even secure your DNS requests meaning that theoretically your ISP could end up knowing virtually nothing about your online life which is awesome just make sure the VPN service is one that you can trust because all the same metadata will be flowing through them and they can theoretically just be exactly as malicious with it so that would be bad, but why do they have to keep track of this information at all can they just leave us alone!? well believe it or not ISPs aren't just tracking you to make a quick buck, identifying patterns and user behavior helps them with traffic management to make your connection run more quickly and reliably and also helps them protect users from cyber attacks and malware, so it's not like there's no benefit to this user data collection but even so no one would blame you if you develop trust issues like me in this brave new world of exploding phones and fake dating profiles, it's good to be safe out there.