Ask HN: AT&T gigabit wants to spy on my Internet traffic, how do I stop them?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6936697

by BryanB55 • 13 years ago

8 5 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm having the new AT&T Uverse "Gigapower" installed today that is being offered in Austin as a response to Google Fiber. After some research I found out that I unknowingly signed up for their plan that gives them the right to monitor and sell my internet usage data...

"When you select AT&T Internet Preferences, we can offer you our best pricing on U-verse with GigaPower because you let us use your individual web browsing information, like the search terms you enter and the web pages you visit, to tailor ads and offers to your interests."

More on that here: http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=KB421828&cv=812&_requestid=757983#fbid=Dxy6PIwLZt8

So my question is, how do I get out of this? I've considered calling up after the install and asking them to switch me to their "standard" plan but even then the only assurance I would have is from some tech support person in India and no way to really know what is being tracked and sold.

Does anyone have recommendations on using a VPN or Tor for all internet traffic in my house? Would that even help? I'm not all that familiar with VPNs and networking but I've considered possibly buying a new router that offers the ability to setup a VPN on it for every device that connects to it. How would that affect internet speeds and could I still take advantage of the currently 300mbps (1gigabit available in mid 2014)?

mschuster91• 13 years ago

You could rent a VPS or dedicated server and setup a OpenVPN gateway on it - if you get one with full-duplex 1 GBit connection, you'll not even lose speed. But it will add some latency to the connection.

So I'd set up a Debian box at home which does the VPN routing for all your machines; if you're into a bit of iptables hacking you can even make a setup like:

1) all machines on the internal network get IP addresses in the 10.0.0.x range, with their traffic being fully routed over the VPN

2) if you hand-assign a machine with a 10.0.1.x IP, then the traffic gets routed "in the clear" over the AT&T network. I'd use this for gaming or latency-critical stuff like Skype only, though. You could also set up a virtual machine for Skype or anything other requiring low-latency communication, bridge its interface to the host's and assigning it a 10.0.1.x IP.

seiji• 13 years ago

You can either go dark (end-to-end encrypted tunnels/proxies) or you can go noisy.

There are a few programs you can download that query Google for random terms every so often (hopefully not triggering bot detection) and go on random browsing sprees from the search results.

Since you're in Austin (and reasonably close to Dallas and Houston), you can grab a VPN service (or host your own) at a local big colo nearby to hopefully minimize added latency (if you only use wireless, you already have 10-50x latency over a wired connection, so you may not notice the difference).

brianwawok• 13 years ago

TOS or otherwise, I see no reason to assume any internet connection in the US has more or less protection from spying.

If you don't want something spied on, you encrypt.

If you don't care and want the lowest latency, you send plaintext. Even if you cancel ATT and get Comcast instead, you should act the exact same. No proof ATT is any worse.

auganov• 13 years ago

A VPN might help to escape AT&T's surveillance, but if you really care about privacy you'd have to make sure it's free from other organizations' surveillance as well, which is kind of hard (and perhaps impossible?). A VPN will only help to escape surveillance that is limited to some area, but other than that it provides no additional security.

ksrm• 13 years ago

Won't simply always using HTTPS protect you from this?

Ask HN: AT&T gigabit wants to spy on my Internet traffic, how do I stop them?

Related Stories