Just a few months ago the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a new measure to increase the overall level of online privacy. In order to prevent the over-abuse of targeted advertisements, the new law would have obliged all ISPs to ask their clients for permission before collecting any information. However, the rule was quite controversial from the very beginning: it would have left out certain companies, such as Google or Facebook, two companies notorious for collecting data under the radars of users and bombarding them with targeted ads.
Since these two media giants act under the Federal Trade Commission, critics were concerned that imposing such limits to only a certain part of the advertising industry could easily result in the monopoly of the other one. This is why the FCC has decided to vote against its own measure to take effect.
Surprisingly, both the FTC and the FCC agreed that the measure should include the entire advertising industry instead of cleansing the advertizing field, leaving the Facebook-Google duo. In fact, both entities issued a joint statement, appointing the FTC as the one entity to regulate online data and privacy security practices, and to apply the same rules to everyone.
However, it’s pretty much impossible to please both the Republican-led FCC and the Democrats in the Senate. The latter party claims that FCC’s new law is another nail in the coffin of better consumer protection and net neutrality, especially after several other consumer-protection orders of the previous FCC administration were reversed.
Despite all good efforts, it is pretty hard to avoid any targeted ads and be safe from any data collection, particularly from companies like Google or Facebook. However, VPNs help a lot in this field too, since many of them have built-in ad blockers to kill those annoying pop-ups, whether you are traced or not. But because VPNs can’t do all the work by themselves, you must be the one taking some extra measures.
One of the best procedures you can adopt is switching to a different and safer search engine that doesn’t follow you. However, if you’re not willing to ditch good old Google, make sure to fine tune your privacy settings: making it delete your search history, cookies etc. the moment you close your browsing session is a good tactic. And if you’re on Facebook, make sure to log out before visiting any other website to prevent the social media giant from accessing any information about you without your consent.
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