On 26 March 2015, the Australian Parliament passed metadata retention laws that allow the government to spy on every internet connected person in Australia. The Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015 (Cth) requires internet service providers (ISP) (including mobile phone service providers) to store your metadata (internet history, logs, phone calls and more) for at least two years.
Your once private metadata is now available, without a warrant or court order, to many Australian security, law enforcement and investigative agencies, whether or not you are a terrorist or criminal. Australian ISPs, who are forced to collect and store your metadata, have warned the data is a honey-pot for hackers and risks being compromised to be traded in illegal on-line marketplaces for malicious purposes.
Other governments have been spying on you internet activities and metadata for years. Once thought of as the paranoid delusions of conspiracy theorists, the spying activities of the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were exposed by Edward Snowden. A former CIA agent, Snowden turned whistle-blower and made public interest disclosures of classified material that revealed the amazing extent of the NSA’s spying activities on its own citizens and billions of people world-wide who use U.S. based internet services (e.g. Microsoft, Google, Facebook and more).
According to a report in The Washington Post in July 2014, relying on information released by Snowden, 90 percent of people placed under surveillance in the U.S. are ordinary people, and are not the intended criminal targets.
The NSA tracks the locations of hundreds of millions of mobile phones per day, allowing them to map people’s movements and relationships in detail. It reportedly has access to all communications made via Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, AOL, Skype, Apple and Paltalk, and collects hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal email and instant messaging accounts each year. The NSA also managed to weaken much of the encryption used on the Internet (by collaborating with, coercing or otherwise infiltrating numerous technology companies), so that the most of Internet privacy is now vulnerable to the NSA.
The capitulation of our government representative to the spying wishes of government security agencies means you need to take steps to protect your privacy.
The simplest method to protect your online metadata from the prying eyes of your ISP and government is to use an anonymous Virtual Private Network (VPN). VPNs work by encrypting and tunnelling your internet data through dedicated computer servers. These servers connect to websites and download files on your behalf and then delete any logs of your activity. This way, your ISP only records that you accessed your VPN but has no idea what sites your visited and no idea what files you downloaded. This also means your downloads won’t be tracked by movie and music industry copyright protection agencies.
This site will show you how to choose the right VPN service provider for you to make protecting your privacy easy, even for dummies and noobs (newbies).