
Ask HN: AT&T gigabit wants to spy on my Internet traffic, how do I stop them? - BryanB55
I&#x27;m having the new AT&amp;T  Uverse &quot;Gigapower&quot; 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...<p>&quot;When you select AT&amp;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.&quot;<p>More on that here: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.att.com&#x2F;esupport&#x2F;article.jsp?sid=KB421828&amp;cv=812&amp;_requestid=757983#fbid=Dxy6PIwLZt8<p>So my question is, how do I get out of this? I&#x27;ve considered calling up after the install and asking them to switch me to their &quot;standard&quot; 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.<p>Does anyone have recommendations on using a VPN or Tor for all internet traffic in my house? Would that even help? I&#x27;m not all that familiar with VPNs and networking but I&#x27;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)?
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mschuster91
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.

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seiji
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).

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auganov
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.

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brianwawok
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.

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

