The Simple Analytics Blog has a disturbing post about Vodaphone and their reintroduction of persistent tracking. Vodafone & Deutsche Telekom are network providers whose job it is to send our data across the Internet and nothing more. They’re supposed to be a simple pipe that passes the data along without interference.
But there’s money to be made so of course they’re abandoning that role. They want to add a unique ID to each transaction so that Websites can query, and pay, them to see what other sites a user has accessed. Vodaphone, of course, is claiming that this is actually a privacy friendly policy but only the most naive will be deceived.
As the article points out, Apple is trying to circumvent this sort of move with their iCloud Private Relay service that encrypts your Web transactions so that Internet providers can’t spy on them. But you don’t need to rely on Apple. Just run a VPN and all your provider can see is that you are connecting to your VPN provider.
On a recent beach vacation with my family, I routed everything through my VPN provider, ExpressVPN, and was delighted at how transparent it was. Once I turned it on, it automatically reconnected each time I woke up one of my devices. There’s really no reason that you couldn’t just leave it running all the time. Indeed, I forgot to turn it off and after I got home I didn’t realize it was still running until a day or two later. As far as I can tell, there was no delay so there’s really no reason just to keep it running all the time. An added bonus is Vodaphone and their ilk will hate that.
Update : are → our