How to set up a VPN in 10 minutes for free (and why you urgently need one)
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Soon every mistake you’ve ever made online will not only be available to your internet service provider (ISP) — it will be available to any corporation or foreign government who wants to see those mistakes.
Thanks to a decision by Congress, ISPs can sell your entire web browsing history to literally anyone without your permission. The only rules that prevented this are all being repealed, and won’t be reinstated any time soon (it would take an act of congress).
ISPs can also sell any information they want from your online activity and mobile app usage — financial information, medical information, your children’s information, your social security number — even the contents of your emails.
They can even sell your geolocation information. That’s right, ISPs can take your exact physical location from minute to minute and sell it to a third party.
You might be wondering: who benefits from repealing these protections? Other than those four monopoly ISPs that control America’s “last mile” of internet cables and cell towers?
No one. No one else benefits in any way. Our privacy — and our nation’s security — have been diminished, just so a few mega-corporations can make a little extra cash.
In other words, these politicians — who have received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the ISPs for decades — have sold us out.
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Having said that, here’s how to browse securely with Opera:
Step #1: Download the Opera browser
Step #2: Turn on its ad blocker
Step #3: Turn on its VPN
Step #4: Install HTTPS Everywhere
Presto — you can now browse the web with reasonable confidence that your ISPs — or really anyone else —don’t know who you are or what you’re doing.
You can even set your VPN to a different country. Here, I’ve set mine to Singapore so websites will think I’m in Singapore. To test this out, I visited ipleak.net and they did indeed think I was in Singapore.