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Protect Your Online Privacy

Four Reasons Why You Should Use a VPN

Protect your privacy

Hide your online identity from third parties and the government

Get around regional restrictions that limit what you can access

See fewer advertisements as marketers will not know where you are

Why Privacy Matters

The Australian Federal Government, on October 13th 2015, introduced mandatory collection of metadata by telcos and ISPs for use by ASIO, the Federal Police, all state and territory police departments, Customs and Border Protection and over a dozen other agencies.

We are being asked by our Federal politicians to accept that this massive invasion of our privacy will somehow improve national security.

The Federal government has turned Telstra, Optus, TPG and all the other service providers in Australia into a giant secret surveillance and monitoring operation, collecting and storing massive amounts of data that electronically log every mobile or landline phone call, every email, download volumes and location information and masses of other information about you.

Intelligence agencies and police have immediate, warrantless access to all telephone and internet metadata. There is absolutely nothing in the Act to prevent “fishing expeditions” or systemic abuse of power, except for retrospective oversight by the Commonwealth Ombudsman. That’s if you somehow found out that an agency was poking around in your metadata, which is unlikely, as there is a two year jail sentence for anyone caught revealing information about instances of metadata access.

Australian citizens were recently reminded about how cyber savvy their Federal government is with the 2016 Australian Census debacle. Public trust and confidence in the government’s capacity or even willingness to protect citizen’s privacy is utterly lost. The fact that politicians actually claimed that census data would not be compromised would be laughable, if it were not so serious.

Everybody’s phone and internet records will be kept for a period of two years, during which time officers from various organizations will be able to effectively scour through almost every aspect of your personal communications.

Outgoing ASIO Chief David Irvine said, “This is not some great mass surveillance exercise or mass invasion of privacy of every citizen in Australia. It is very, very carefully targeted.”

How carefully targeted? Well, it includes every person in Australia who has a phone or an internet connection.

Here is some of what Steve Dalby, Chief Regulatory Officer at iiNet (an Australian ISP) had to say on the issue of mandatory data retention:

…The data collected can be incredibly sensitive – it can reveal who your friends are, where you go and what websites you visit. Indeed, it may even tell more than the content of a phone call or an email. Recent research from Stanford University showed that when analysed, this data may create a revealing profile of a person’s life including medical conditions, political and religious views, friends and associations.

Police say “If you have nothing to hide, then you shouldn’t be worried”. Personally I think that if you follow that dubious logic, we’d all be walking around naked. It’s not about being worried, or wanting to ‘hide’ anything. It’s about the right to decide what you keep private and what you allow to be shared. YOU should be the one to make that call, and that decision should stick until a warrant or something similar is issued to law enforcement agencies to seize your information.

Experts in the US have some equally frightening things to say about metadata. According to NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker, “…metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life.” General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and frighteningly asserted, “We kill people based on metadata.”

Why do I need a Virtual Private Network like ipVanish?

The “nothing to hide” argument used by the Government and Security Agencies is supposed to imply that if you disagree you must be guilty of something. Well, that is not good enough! You could well ask George Brandis, the recently retired Attorney General, whether he has curtains in his house, and if so, what is he trying to hide.

Here is a short list of what some people think about George "trust me, I’m a lawyer" Brandis’s nothing to hide argument:

“I don’t need to justify my position, you need to justify yours. Come back with a warrant.”

“I don’t have anything to hide. But I don’t have anything I feel like showing you either.”

“Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

“It is not about having nothing to hide, it’s about my things not being any of your bloody business.”

“I actually don’t have anything much to hide, but a lady I know will have her life ruined if her government worker ex-husband starts poking around in the database.”

Canadian privacy expert David Flaherty expresses a similar idea when he argues:

“There is no sentient human being in the Western world who has little or no regard for his or her personal privacy; those who would attempt such claims cannot withstand even a few minutes’ questioning about intimate aspects of their lives without capitulating to the intrusiveness of certain subject matters.”

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Because the concept of privacy is hard to define in legal terms, people in positions of authority like Joseph Stalin and George Brandis get away with passing laws that treat our right to privacy with utter contempt. I am not suggesting that any alternative (Labor) Attorney General would be any better than George Brandis.

Just because the concept of privacy is fraught with ambiguity, and may be difficult to nail down in legal terms, does not mean that Aussies don’t know when they are being screwed around by politicians with half baked, politically correct, let’s pretend everyone is a terrorist, approaches to security.

Another attempt to justify the flagrant abuses that data retention laws enable is to make the grand claim that “Google already knows everything about you”. This is the most specious and contemptible claim of the government’s apologists. Google doesn’t run a Federal Police Force, a national system of courts and prisons, and it probably does a better job of keeping nosey third parties out of its databases.

As a citizen of a free country you have a right to decide exactly what information about yourself that you want to share with others, and what you don’t want to share.

There is no better way to create a feeling of frustration and helplessness in your relationships with the institutions of our country than for them to know absolutely everything about you, and for you to have no say in who sees the collected information or what they do with it.

Well, now you can have a say in what information the government is able to collect about you. Set up an IPVanish virtual private network, and take back control of your privacy.

Stop your ISP from spying on you and perhaps throttling your speed. ISPs often employ Deep Packet Inspection to snoop on your Internet traffic and limit your Internet speed, including video streaming speeds, based on your Internet usage. IPVanish prevents Deep Packet Inspection and helps you maintain your privacy.

All of the information you send and receive online is packaged into packets of data, so when your ISP uses deep packet inspection it scans all of the data packets that cross its network.

The reason this poses a threat to your privacy is because your ISP is free to go through everything you've exchanged online. Personal information including shopping records, location and age can be collected and sold to advertising companies.

ISPs also use deep packet inspection to monitor your Internet usage and to throttle your Internet speed, which can make it difficult to stream media, or play online games. Governments also use this method to block access to websites for censorship purposes.

When you establish a secure connection with IPVanish you prevent deep packet inspection, prevent media throttling, and protect your privacy because all of your traffic is encrypted.

 

Prevent getting hacked while using public wi-fi / hotspots.

Your mobile device is an important part of your life that travels with you everywhere you go – so why not protect it? When you're on the move all of your activities containing your private data (social media, banking, messaging, emails) are not safe from prying eyes and cyber criminals unless you're using a VPN.

IPVanish mobile apps are the easiest and most effective way to secure your on-the- go Internet connections. After you download the iOS or Android app, within seconds you're connected to a secure server with an anonymous IP address. This turns Wi-Fi hotspots into a safe environment because not only is your online data now passed through an encrypted tunnel, but your true location is also hidden behind an IPVanish anonymous IP.

 

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Keep your online presence and information private

When you are travelling, international censorship and corporate firewalls can prevent you from accessing many of the sites you frequent at home, such as Facebook and Twitter. Keep your online freedom by using IPVanish VPN on your laptop, tablet and phone.

Once you establish a VPN connection all of your online data (emails, instant messages, data transfers, online banking) pass through an encrypted tunnel.

When you're connected to IPVanish, your IP address and location disappear and are replaced with an IPVanish IP address. You can prevent online marketers, search engines and websites from analyzing and using your IP address or location. Geo-targeting is effectively stopped in its tracks by using a VPN.

 

Watch Hulu, BBC, Sky, ITV sports and news from anywhere in the world 

Services like Hulu, Sky, ITV  and even YouTube provide content based on location. Use IPVanish to grab an anonymous IP address and appear to be at whatever location you choose. You can watch whatever you want from wherever you want.

Many Aussies living overseas use IPVanish to enable them to watch certain online TV programs that are restricted to viewers using Australian IP addresses.  Using the same Geolocation concept, Aussies can watch BBC, Sky, Hulu or similar foreign services from home  in Melbourne or anywhere else by using IPVanish to pretend they are logging on from London or San Francisco.  Anime lovers can use a Japanese IP to vastly improve their choice of viewing too.

German politician Malte Spitz sued his German Telco demanding a copy of the information they were storing about him, collected mainly from his mobile phone. The European Union sounds like it is trying to copy China or Iran with this level of invasive data collection and retention. Don't let Australia go down this path to totalitarian government manipulation of our rights.

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Certain parts of the above are adapted from Daniel J Solove's treatise on the misunderstandings of privacy entitled "I've Got Nothing to Hide" (2008). All the thoughtful, philosophical bits would be his, and the cheap digs at the recently retired Attorney General would be mine.

You can read his article here.