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Your internet service provider (ISP) is the postman that knows all the addresses of your recipients. It variably depends on the place you live, or the rules set up by your ISP which take care of the content you access on internet. Call them the new security guards of internet!
You can assume internet as an international postal service, where your ISP is your personal mailman that ensures that you get your mails right at time, also that your emails get delivered right on time at the destined address. This is done by ISP, because it knows your IP address as well as the IP address of the person with whom you want to change information. The IP address makes it possible to identify each device that uses internet, makes it all the way more easy for anybody to locate you over internet.
Apart from just identifying or locating the device on internet, an ISP can easily combine the IP address data with the time details regarding a particular computer to reveal how long it was online and when. Also the ISP can monitor and track the amount of data that gets sent or received by your system.
Data exchanged over the internet is done in form of data packets, and each data packet has address of the recipient and the number of the data packets sent and exchanged, therefore it becomes easy for the ISP to monitor and track the activities by following the IP address of every system enrolled in their network. Tracking the activity of the system does not imply tracking the person who’s using that system. But on the other hand, ISP knows you, knows that you’re availing the service of internet, and that it has given you the IP address for your system; it all makes sense at the end of the day!
Data Logging By ISPs
ISPs have a log of your daily internet activities. What raises an alarming question is that for how long should they maintain that log? To be precise, it depends from company to company, as well as country and other rules. For example, many telecom companies in Europe are required to maintain the data logs for approx. 2 years. The data logs may contain the time, date, source, destination and the kind of device used for data transmission for emails, calls, messages. The maintenance of these kind of logs may look like an invasion in privacy of the users.
An Internet Bouncer?
In USA, ISP is all set to get transformation! New center for copyright information, a group that was made up RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America, and MPAA i.e. Motion Picture Association of America, and top five ISPs of America (AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Cablevision, Time Warner cable) is about to take measures to cut off the internet piracy, and manage everything.
This center is supposed to “sniff” all internet data packet to find out the copyrighted materials, as well as IP address of the sender. The center will be then responsible to inform ISP that a possible illegal activity is noticed from an IP address that belongs to them. The end result could be, the internet subscriber losing the internet connection.
Tunnel It All
Because your ISP knows your IP address, knows much more about you! Is it worth the risk one could take for the maintenance of privacy? One might not feel comfortable with this, though many would disagree with it! The only way out of this is by cutting the source of information through which your ISP tracks your activities, i.e. by using a VPN software such as eShield VPN!
eShield VPN is a free VPN, and when one uses it, the ISP is only able to see that you’re communicating with eShield Proxy Server, and not with the IP that is assigned to you eShield. Your ISP would only be able to see the amount of encoded data that flows through your system and from the internet, it won’t be able to monitor or read the data that is being flown. It is a secure idea than using any other service. You can assume it as a mailman who would send your mail, and not read it!