Privacy and Deep Packet Inspection

Deep packet inspection is the process of capturing your Internet communications and reading through it.  When you send an e-mail or surf the web, your Internet communication is much more than just the e-mail or web page you visit.  It contains all types of Internet headers that detail the communication and formatting as well as the actual e-mail or web page.  For the average person, most of this is completely unintelligible.  Deep packet inspection tools can strip out the extraneous information used by your computer and the Internet.

The problem is that in these packets is plenty of personal or confidential information.  You could have anything from log in information to financial data.  This is one of the ways that criminals steal your identity, access your accounts or find out way too much about you.

It looks like the US government is looking at the danger of deep packet inspection.  According to CIO magazine, Congress is looking at making this illegal.  Interesting enough, no one admits to performing deep packet inspection on your Internet communications.  However, your ISP, your employer and criminals have the ability to perform this inspection.

There is a solution today however.  We do not need to wait on the U.S. Congress.  You can use an anonymous proxy to encrypt your Internet communucation that can delay or defeat deep packet inspection.

As always, the key to digital privacy is to protect your privacy yourself.  Do not rely on others.  Privacy is taken, not given.

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