Does RuinMyHistory Prevent ISP from Selling Your Data?

Can RuinMyHistory really prevent your ISP from selling your private data? A couple of days ago, Github contributor ‘FascinatedBox‘ released a script dubbed RuinMyHistory. According to FascinatedBox, he created the script “in protest of the new privacy bill, which will pollute your search history.” There’s no doubt that this noble attempt has American Internet users’ interest at heart. However, unless the script is substantially improved, RuinMyHistory will not really prevent your ISP from collecting or selling your data.

How Does RuinMyHistory Work?

When you run the RuinMyHistory script, a popup window cycles through different websites. The aim is to pollute your web history so that it becomes worthless to potential buyers.

Why It Won’t Prevent Your ISP from Selling Your Data

First off, RuinMyHistory does not encrypt your search history. The webpages you search and visit for will still be visible. As many Reddit users pointed out, the script has many flaws.

• It iterates over the same 133 pages over and over again, every five seconds. Then it does nothing on these sites. There is almost no randomness there, and all randomness that there is caused by latency. – lared930
• It needs to draw the searches at random from a database of actual searches. Perhaps if it submitted your search history to a central hub when then distributed random searches from other people back to include in your search history. – wrgrant
• ISPs can filter out the top 100’s and learn a lot about you from sites not on the top 100. The reality is that those sites aren’t going to be the major threats to one’s privacy. – JerikTelorian
• The site you visit is a very very small part of the data that an advertiser is interested in. What you do on those sites is much more meaningful. Visiting the same sites, quickly, with no interaction is not enough to create ‘useless data’. – SparkyBear

Want to Prevent Your ISP from Selling Your Data? Use VPN

In order to prevent your ISP from selling your private data, you need to re-route all your Internet traffic through a secure, private tunnel. Your ISP can actually see that you are connected to that tunnel, but cannot trace what you are doing online while connected to that tunnel. This process is exactly what happens when you use VPN.

When you connect to a VPN server, you are basically encrypting all your Internet traffic and masking your IP address. That means that neither your ISP, websites you visit, or apps you use can track what you are doing online.

Here are all the features you VPN services must provide.

• No-Logs Policy.
• Up-to-date VPN protcols.
• VPN apps for PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android.
• Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-265)
• Fast VPN servers on Tier-1 networks.

The following list contains the best VPN providers you can use to prevent your ISP from collecting or selling your private data.

How to Prevent ISP from Selling Your Data?

Frankly, it is quite frustrating that we all have to take all these extra measures to protect our private data, search history, and browsing activities. Being able to browse the web without having to worry that everybody, including your ISP, is eavesdropping on you should be a basic right.