“Does privacy still exist on the internet in 2018?” This is a question that will be asked a lot this year. Let’s give a brief timeline of internet and privacy in 2018 thus far. China tried to ban all VPN services from the start of February of this year. Just before 2018 happened, Russia put a law in place that instructed VPN companies to ban certain sites from users in Russia. If you don’t know what a VPN is, a VPN is a virtual private network that allows people to have freedom on the internet. But the biggest event this year? Facebook. Or more so the revealing of the fact that Facebook exposed the data of 87 million users.
So does privacy still exist on the internet in 2018? Yes and no. It depends on what you are accessing and where you are connected to the internet.
Do you know why Facebook is such a great tool for marketing? As when you turn on a TV, you can be a granny or you can be a 7-year old child. You might be looking to buy a car, or you might be looking to buy a bicycle. A TV ad is mostly a lottery. Sure, you can somewhat predict a certain type of audience based on what’s on, but other than that, you don’t have any control.
Facebook is great for marketing because you can reach the people that you want to reach. No lotteries like with TV ads involved. How can one reach a precise audience? Well, one simply needs to know what somebody wants based on what a person does. Facebook knows who wants what. And that makes it great for marketing. But your privacy suffers because of this as data is needed to know what who wants.
But this has been an issue for many years. And not just on Facebook.
Big social media platforms need plenty of money to run. Do you know how much it costs to allow hundreds of millions of users to use a service at one time? And we are just talking about servers here. Never mind the developers, the customer service, and the people that check if the content meets guidelines. Oh, and then a company needs to make money too as that’s a goal of businesses at the end of the day. If you offer a free service and want to have all of that, you need to have ads. Whatever big service you use, expect that your information will be taken and then used for ads.
Does privacy still exist on the internet in 2018 when it comes to social media? No. But it hasn’t for a long time.
So you thought if you aren’t on social media platforms that you will have privacy on the internet? Not exactly.
While Facebook takes your data, most governments aren’t any better, and actually do far worse than Facebook.
In fact, it’s not just governments. Internet providers can do that too. And don’t forget that the operator of the Wi-Fi that you are connected to can check what you are up to too. And you don’t even need to have control over it when it comes to open networks. A piece of software is all you need to access things like passwords.
But, there is a way to stay protected against the government, internet providers, and open-networks that you will be using whenever you connect to free Wi-Fi. You need to use a VPN which is a virtual private network.
Once you are connected to one, everything you do becomes unreadable to anybody trying to access it as what you are doing is encrypted.
Facebook takes your data. But that data is most likely not near as sensitive as the information that the government or somebody in charge of the internet in a hotel can take from you.
Our VPN comes with the AES 256-bit encryption code with 2048-bit DH key meaning that it would hurt even a government to try to crack that code when it comes to money. It would be ridiculously expensive. We are talking trillions of dollars kind of expensive. So rest assured that you will be safe. Unless you turn it off.
And it’s relatively simple to set up. You merely have to click on the Buy button and go through our 3-step registration process followed by downloading the right version of our client. You can find all the versions of our client on the Download page at the bottom of our website. After you install our client, provide your details and connect to a server of your choice. And that’s it. You get a lot of the privacy that you were missing out on before.
Great question. And it depends entirely on the company. The best choice is to go for a company that isn’t legally able to take your data due to the laws in the country that the company is based in. At PrivateVPN, even if we wanted to use your data, we can’t. Sweden has strict privacy laws. The law can be taken more seriously than a word of a company, right? After all, Facebook states that it cares about your privacy.
Another thing to look for is the terms and conditions. Facebook’s VPN service Onavo collects data from you for example. That’s exactly what a VPN service is not meant to do. Luckily they do tell you that in an obvious manner but some companies don’t.
Be careful.
Social media? What you do is collected. The rest of the internet? It depends on whether you are encrypted or not.
Written by Michael Smolski.