VPN Help

[Al]

I'm having U-verse Gigapower installed next week. I had a lot of reservations about this since AT&T virtually forces you to agree to their Internet Preference Agreement, signing away any most of your privacy. In any case, I was wondering if a VPN would help me in preventing some or all of their snooping. I really don't know much about VPNs, so any suggestions or guidance would be appreciated.

[scole of TSBT]

How will they snoop on your network or do you have any specific concerns about how they set up the service?

[Al]

They do it via the browser, logging search words, links clicked, length of time at the site, etc. Their process pays no attention to your browsers security settings. I know this happens all the time and has for years, but AT&T is so in your face about what they're doing and what they will do with the information, it seems to bother me more. I'm just pulling at straws to find a way to gain back some of the privacy I just gave away.

[scole of TSBT]

Setting up a VPN internally on your home network won't hide anything going out over the internet through AT&T. Only data going between computers on your home network would be encrypted. Once it hits your router and heads to AT&T, it's no longer part of a VPN or encrypted. In order for a VPN to be of any use to hide network activity from AT&T, you would have to setup a VPN between your computer (or home network) and every computer/remote network you plan to access.

[Bok]

If you use a 3rd Party VPN for your connection it should help out. Something like https://www.goldenfrog.com/vyprvpn but it's going to cost.

[Al]

Well, I think I resigned myself to giving up my privacy. My close neighbors are getting 600 to 900mbsp down and 300 - 900mbps up...so I guess that is my selling price. If I get close to those speeds I won't fell like the $2 whore I did initially. I'll post what I'm actually getting when I get it installed. It will probably be early February as they need to send out another crew to route the fiber under our private road before they can do anything else.

[MindCrime]

I think even with a VPN your provider can see where your packets end up or came from just not their content. As Bok says it'll cost and I believe your bandwidth/data usage will come into play at some point. There are free ones out there but they'll put a limit on your time and your bandwidth will suffer.

[cineon_lut]

Packet source and destination can easily be recorded, but secure connections (like https, or SSL VPN) should be encrypted packets between the source and destination. Meaning they can see the route of the packet, but not the contents of the packets.

[Mumps]

So, yes, they can see you're visiting PirateBay, but not what you're downloading.

[zombie67]

Mix in TOR.