With a mass-communications surveillance scheme imposed by Attorney-General George Brandis, a copyright firm securing court support to obtain Internet Service Provider customer information, and a new bill to force ISPs to block websites the copyright lobby doesn’t like, there has never been a better time for Australians to embrace online anonymity and encryption tools to hide their personal online lives from spying.
New polling from Essential Research shows that that is exactly what we’re doing. Sixteen per cent of Australians have used a VPN or Tor (the anonymising routing system), according to today’s Essential Report.
However, usage varies widely, with almost twice as many men as women using VPNs/Tor, and men being more likely to use anonymising methods like unidentifiable email addresses (you might extrapolate from that about online behaviour such as trolling and pornography, but there’s no evidentiary basis for it). Women are, however, more likely to delete something they’ve put online in the past (if they can). People under 35, who are “digital natives”, are far more likely to use anonymising methods, with more than a fifth of them using VPNs or Tor.
The polling comes as foreign VPNs continue to report skyrocketing rates of VPN usage by Australians. Hong Kong provider PureVPN told Crikey it had recently seen a 400% increase in Australian traffic and a similar rise in queries from potential Australian customers, and a 32% rise in the reactivation of old Australian accounts; Panama-based NordVPN also reported a “significant increase” in traffic from Australia and queries from Australians.
Expect that increase to continue as politicians, bureaucrats and multinationals continue to try to spy on Australians.
I set up my VPN tunnel this week Bernard. Setting it up to run on the router was easy. The hard part was ramming it through my bloody router’s firewall to supply all of my network users with an encrypted tunnel outside Australia and ending in a country where privacy and freedom are still respected. Oh and I’m over 55 years old.
I’ll remember the cost and the effort and the time involved at election time. Both Labor and Liberal are responsible for this police state Nazi shit. The worse part is we’ll all have to pay for them to spy on us and it will all be for nothing. A pox on both their houses.
Zeke: “a country where privacy and freedom are still respected” Where? Russia? Brazil?
Rais, How about Scandinavia for kick off.
Its not for nothing Zeke, the spooks want to be able to provide lists for the coming purges and ‘tightening up’ of employment ‘safeguards’. Corporations already do it, the government also wants to systematically weed out all non-doubleplusgood right thinkers. Be uncurious, be normal, or be blacklisted.
Bernard, could Crikey put up a page with basic info and how-tos for the majority of us who want to, but don’t really know how, to protect our privacy?