Privacy through ISP

Hello people,

First of all, I do not really know where privacy-related threads should be posted, so I apologize if this is the wrong place :p .

I was wondering if my understanding of dial-ups and ISP is correct.
Say you have a dial-up connection. When you connect to your ISP, an ip address is attributed to your machine. When you access the outside world, you go through the ISP's proxy. So far so good?
So when you access a certain website, the server hosting that website logs your connection as coming from your ISP, not you directly. Still correct?

However, the ISP keeps logs (I suppose) of what sites were accessed. In that case, they should have your assigned ip logged as having requested a connection to that particular website. Do they also keep a log of what users were logged at the time and which ip they were assigned?

If the above is correct, then an ISP could, in theory, have a listing of everything you ever did while you were connected through them.
Is there any way of evading that? Such as connecting through another proxy after your isp's or having your connection encrypted (as over ssh)?

Cheers,

cold_connection

They will allways at least know when you logged in and from what number, you could jump form them into a dubble blind proxy so taht is all they would see but the dubble blind proxy would also be keeping some logs, if you did something overly illigal some one would eventaly find you.

Proxies will take care of the privacy issue for the most part, but the thing that you need to remember is that you are using the ISP's network, lines, and resources. They have every right to monitor what you do while using their service, mostly to protect themselves, and the other users of their service.

If you're not breaking the law, there is really no need for a proxy.

You will never achive complete privacy on the internet. Yes, you can use a proxy server and gain a false sense of privacy, but if anyone seriously wants to know who you are....there are ways of tracing you.
Even using a public terminal, say as in a cyber cafe, you can be traced and found out if the authorities want you bad enough.
The real question would be, who do you want to hide your identity from. And for what reason. If it is to break the law or to do something malious, then you must start considering just how much the authorities are willing to spend to find you. If it is just to surf p0rn in private, then it is a different matter.
Mostly on the internet, you have privacy of being in a crowd. One of many millions of people who surf the net daily. No one would really wish to know who you are personally. They would probably want to track your surfing habits and buying tendancies so they could target you with adds, but that is why we have spyware/adware removale tools.
So, the basic question remains.....What are you trying to hide.

Hehe,

Thanks for the reply, you guys.
I suppose I don't have anything to hide, apart from my credit details when I do some online shopping. I guess I just don't like the idea of being watched all the time. This invasion of privacy is, in my opinion, quite disturbing. But I guess I'd better get used to it. As hearing it from you people, tomorrow isn't the day I will not be snooped on ;) Though the question would also apply to encryption then...
Remember - it's not paranoia when they really are after you :D

Go wireless then, or some other allways on type of broadband, at least then they wont be able t otell when you are sitting at your machine.

Treat your visits to the internet in the same way as you treat your walks down the main street of your town. There are lots of people out there and they can all see what you are doing. Thus if you treat it that way you will never worry about your privacy. Why? 'Cos you ain't got none, son.... ;)

It seems like this is very simple to solve.

Problem: You want security and privacy during online transactions

Solution: Good buisness/bank transation sites will require a login, and take you to an secure SSL page (the little yellow lock on the bottom left of the browser) This means your information is going through an encrypted medium and safe. That does not mean it is 100% secure, as a few advanced methods can get around that, but I would vouce it to be 99% secure based on the level of skill needed for such a hack.

This means your privacy is already being protected where you wanted it the most.

First lemme start by saying i only know about my ISP that I work for. And we have no proxy that our dial up users go through to meet the outside world. Im sure they thought about it, but lets think about it here. We have 400,000 dial up customers. They get virus', and infected with spam bots. Now.. if one of them were spamming through our Proxy, then our proxy with 400,000 users would get blocked as opposed to the single customer.

However ISP's that DO offer such a proxy, keep a RADIUS log(This matches your IP with a username). If an abuse report comes from The Secret Service(Which they do daily), then and only then will they release that information. Other wise they would just suspend your account for mis-use.

Another thing...there really is no privacy on the net from your ISP. I could take a Packet capture on a dial up IP and if he was chatting on AIM or IRC or Yahoo, i could straight up read the messages. Point of the story, you have no privacy from your ISP. Just behave, and they wont have a reason.