Today, I will tell you a tale. A story of the company that foreigners speak of in jealous whispers. The trophy boy of America. The superhero company who gives the internet to all, at an affordable price–known for its amazing top ranked customer service. That company is Comcast. Okay, see something wrong yet?
Well, it’s not a secret that Comcast is in many ways a terrible company. In 2014, they were voted just that–the “Worst Company in America”. Public relation disasters are like bread and butter for this company, with extensive public calls showing bad customer service and public reveals outlining the company’s detailed journal that retention specialists use to harang their customers. To put the icing on the cake, the company even managed to fire a man for complaining about receiving poor customer service.
But wait! There’s more!
Comcast is now planning on injecting Javascript code into their customers data streams. This code will display overlays onto web pages that remind thirsty internet customers of their data cap thresholds. Comcast describes these obtrusive overlays as “in-browser notifications”. Wonderful!
Another neat possibility is an overlay that tells you that your modem might need to be replaced. Yeah, you know the one they gave you that already looked, smelled, and acted 5 years too old? Sadly, this code injection isn’t a feature, or a checklist that you can opt out on when setting up your service. No, it’s there for good, and they don’t want you to do anything about it. The policy web page itself even seems very innocent.
There’re plenty of things wrong with data injection. These in-browser notifications might not have limits as they could obscure your content, slow down web pages, or even break web pages themselves. Or, if you’re aesthetically inclined, they could just make everything look like a trashy billboard.
In some ways, this data injection is a reminder of how much power internet service providers can have with your internet connection. They can snoop on you, read your data, and use that data to market to you, adjust prices, and have their way with you.
Some may argue that it’s the responsibility of the consumer to protect themselves from corporations, or that it’s not that hard to get around stupid things like obtrusive ads. In some ways, that’s very true. Using a powerful premium VPN service like TorGuard VPN, is very straightforward. It only requires logging into a simple client. It even has cross platform availability– mobile applications included! TorGuard VPN service maintains quick speeds while it encrypts your traffic, effectively hiding everything you do from a nosey ISP.
Then again, if companies like Comcast weren’t trying to stretch their revenue as far as possible with data caps and thus code injection procedures to enforce, monitor, and progress their monetization models–we wouldn’t have to worry about anything in the first place. Well, maybe corrupt governments, hackers, region locks–OK! There’s still plenty of reasons we need VPN.
It’s the age of internet censorship and great firewalls, the age of data stream injection, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood ISP. Protect yourself while you can with TorGuard VPN.
