Do you want to keep your internet browsing safe and private? Do you wonder if your connection provider is watching you when you surf the internet? If you have answered these questions as yes, then you have arrived at the right place.
First, let’s understand what legal rights to internet providers have in regards to your internet activities. In early September, the deputy from the Servant of the People Denis Monastyrsky submitted to the Verkhovna Rada two bills (4003 and 4004), which amend the legislation in the field of cybersecurity and the activities of telecom providers. Providers will have to store data about user connections for 12 months and share them with law enforcement officers at the request of the investigation. However, the users who protect their connection with a VPN service may not get tracked by their providers at all. In addition, the concept of virtual assets (which can be withdrawn) may appear in the legislation, and electronic information will be equated to ordinary ones.
We figured out what Internet providers know about customers, how they interact with the security forces now and what changes are fraught with.
What Do Internet Providers Know About Internet Users?
“Providers see all traffic from internal networks (home or corporate) without dividing into devices. That is, they see only the IP address of the network, not the MAC address of the device,” explains Vadim Gudim, a security specialist at the Digital Security Lab.
Whether the provider can see what exactly the user is doing on the site depends on the type of connection, the expert specifies. If this is web traffic and the user visits a site with https: // – TLS encryption, then only the website address and metadata are available to the provider, the content of the pages is not.
The MAC address is the unique address of the chip that speaks to the network. Laptops, smartphones, etc. also have it. There may be one or more. Knowing the MAC address, you can understand from which particular device the resource was accessed. The network IP address only shows that the site was visited by someone who was connected to your home network.
However, a home network can be used privately as well by connecting a Double VPN service which ensures your connection is artificially replaced by a regular IP.
Metadata is information about which IP address to which IP address was accessed, when, what volume and type of traffic, and other characteristics.
HTTPS (Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure) is a protocol for exchanging information between a site and a user’s device, which provides confidentiality and data security at three levels of protection. This encrypts the traffic, fixes any changes or distortions, if any, and site authentication, which ensures that this is exactly the resource that users need.
In 2016, the search giant Google, which accounts for over 92% of all web searches, announced that it would downgrade sites without encryption. Therefore, today most sites on the Internet use encryption certificates.
We hope the information we have given on this page was helpful and relevant. Thanks for coming here and giving your precious time to this article.