The UK is about to pass into law sweeping surveillance legislation that will force ISPs and mobile operators to keep a complete record of every citizen’s browsing history for up to a year. This information will be accessible without a warrant to intelligence services, the police, and a number of other government agencies — including, bizarrely, the likes of the Gambling Commission and the Food Standards Agency.
While much of the legislation is concerned with how the government can track down serious criminals like terrorists and child abusers, it’s the wholesale collection of every citizen’s web activity that has a lot of people worried. After all, there’s very little oversight about how the information is accessed, and it’s private companies that have to store the data, there is a good chance it will get stolen by hackers at some point. (If this sounds too pessimistic, remember that in the last year alone, there have been two major attacks in the UK stealing customer data from the ISP TalkTalk and the mobile operator Three.)
So, if you’re a UK citizen who doesn’t want their browser history to end up in a government vault, how do you protect yourself?
Use a Virtual Private Network
This is really the simplest advice for anyone looking to use the internet with a little more privacy. A VPN or Virtual Private Network is a service that passes your internet traffic through different servers around the world. Not all VPNs are created equal, though, and companies differ on whether or not they encrypt that traffic, or whether they keep logs of users’ activity. (This doesn’t mean recording browser history, per se, but can include basic information like “computer with IP address X used our VPN network for Y hours on Z day.”)