Thanks to a massive outcry among the internet-using public the music and film industry got their asses handed to them when they tried to get the SOPA law into legislation but while the web was celebrating its victory these people were busy lobbying for worse laws.
One of them will require internet providers to log and save all of a customer’s internet activity, including email, web browsing, downloads, IM, social networking and anything else for six months and give these information to any authority asking for them along with the customer’s name, address & phone number; a list of all phone calls and all credit-cards, bank accounts or other methods the customer used to pay for anything. Besides that providers will launch a massive copyright spying scheme this July that could get you cut off from the web completely.
The content mafia along with the American government bullied many other countries into making similar laws by threatening them with a trading ban if they don’t protect American copyrights. This happened in Canada and Spain before and just recently in Ireland. The UK has ridiculous plans to log every step you make online anyway and except for Sweden and Germany all EU states force their internet providers to save internet connection data for six months as well.
Scary stuff, indeed
Protect Yourself
If you don’t want anyone to know what you’re doing online you should do whatever you can to protect your privacy. One way to do that is using a Virtual Private Network (VPN). If you use a VPN all your internet traffic is tunnelled through an encrypted connection so neither the authorities nor your internet provider can see what you’re doing, no matter if you’re using file sharing apps, watching porn or doing something political that your government might not agree with. Your real IP will be hidden, the only thing the world will get to see of you is a random IP of the VPN provider.
The important part is to chose a VPN provider who doesn’t keep any connection logs because otherwise the VPN provider could be forced to reveal your real IP. But there are some VPN providers out there who don’t store connection logs whatsoever. The one I personally use is PrivatVPN because it’s extremely simple to set up, it’s fast and you can even switch between British, American, Swedish, Dutch, Swiss & French IPs which is neat for using different online video services.
There are two little downsides: It’s not free, it costs a few bucks per month (but then again, your privacy should be worth it) and, due to American law, the US server has to keep some logs so if you want to do something that you want to keep private you should use one of the other servers.
