Tag Archives: privacy

tech, Uncategorized

Pi-Hole

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I’ve been experimenting with a Pi-Hole for the past two weeks. This evening I reconfigured the home network so all of our devices will default to using the Pi-Hole for IP address assignment and DNS.

Next, I set up a group so my wife’s work computer will be exempted from DNS filtering. A web-based application shouldn’t break because of a blocked tracker, but I don’t want to troubleshoot any collateral damage.

Finally, I reconfigured my phone and desktop to get their IP and DNS information dynamically instead of the static settings they’d been using while I evaluated the set up.

If all goes according to plan, I just sit back and relax and no longer have to deal with ads for an item I bought last week following me across the web for the next month.

(Public domain image from US National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

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Protecting Your Online Data

Advertisement for Norton VPN Dad forwarded an email he got from Symantec today. The subject line was “Breaking: New legislation affects your online privacy” and went on to suggest he could subscribe to their “Norton WiFi Privacy” product to stop his Internet Service Provider from selling his browsing data.

My take is that he should save his money. This is just Symantec doing some very opportunistic, and cynical, marketing. The place where a VPN is most valuable is when you’re using a network you don’t know whether to trust (e.g. the free WiFi at your neighborhood sub shop).

For now at least, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and probably others are making a big deal about how they’re not collecting/selling your web browsing behavior (though they’re certainly leaving room to change that once the furor dies down — they did after all spend a huge amount of money lobbying against those rules).

Even without VPN, when you visit a web site that uses HTTPS (and more than half of the web does now), your internet provider can’t tell what you did there. They can certainly tell that you visited https://www.mybank.com, but because it’s https:// instead of http://, they can’t tell what specific pages you visited.

USA Today had a good article about some ways to protect your online privacy. Subscribing to a VPN service wasn’t one of them.

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Stopping Credit Card Offers

It seems like the mail includes a good number of credit card offers. Various companies seem to send offers for their special Visa or Mastercard affinity programs almost daily. It only takes a moment to run them through the shredder, and the fees for sending them help keep the lights on at the Post Office. Besides, figuring out how to stop them takes too long, right?

But Thursday’s daily email included something special! A credit card offer with the magic phrase, “You can choose to stop receiving “prescreened” offers of credit from this and other companies by calling toll-free 1-888-567-8688.” Now I’m suspicious of pretty much any offer that comes in as a spam email (These turkeys weren’t even supporting the Post Office!) but a Google search is pretty painless.

The second result was the US Federal Trade Commission’s “Prescreened Credit and Insurance Offers” page. So what do you know? That phone number’s legit.

So it turns out there are actually three options:

  1. Call 888-567-8688 and you can stop (most) credit card offers for five years.
  2. You can also stop (most) credit card offers by visiting https://www.optoutprescreen.com/, clicking the “Click Here to Opt-In or Opt-Out” button.
  3. Or you can go for the gold by visiting that same link, printing out the form at the end, and mailing it to 
    Opt­Out Department
P.O. Box 2033
Rock Island, IL 61204­-2033

    .

Total time spent: less than five minutes.

(Image via pixabay)