How do we protect ourselves when ISPs are selling our data?

Well, that was a thread killer *** does your high gas tax have to do with ISP's selling our browsing information. Pay attention.

Any opportunity to vent I guess.

@Clueless
The gas tax was an example. The point is the lack of public interest to prevent unfair changes. Pay attention.

It's a topic I think is under discussed. Too bad they didn't increase it a penny a year rather than catch up all at once. Here in the USA the last gas tax raise was in 1993 and it's time.

He was talking about Individual STATE fuel taxes, not the Fed Fuel Tax. If/when the Fed Fuel Tax does go up, then the price of EVERYTHING one can buy will go up right along with it. Why? Because Trucking companies are the ones who actually pay the highest fuel taxes both Federally and in each State they fuel up their trucks in. THEY are the ones who essentially pay for our roads and highways.

What Joe Blow pays in gas tax to fill up his Prius and Jane.Q. Public pays to fill up her beater is just a drop in the bucket comparatively speaking on the whole. I don't know why California charges so much for their gas/fuel taxes other than to pad politicians pockets and off shore bank accounts. I've run all over California and their Interstates are so rough I HAD to wear a seat-belt simply to stay behind the steering wheel of the truck I was driving, no less for 'safety'. I think that without saying as much, that is just one thing that webserf had on his mind when he vented his frustration and used it as just another example of how the "Public Servant" skrooz the lot of us on a regular basis.

Please top post. I'm going to like that because of something I did 6 months ago.

Exactly what topic to which are you referring??? And where should I put it???

If you travel much, you will see that we have some of the cheapest gas in the world. Germany was $6/gallon last visit, Costa Rica is $8/gallon right now. We are spoiled here. Our disposable income is among the highest in the world. No one likes taxes but everyone wants the services they provide.

in the other countries has little to do with the price here in the US. They have NO sources of their own oil and therefore have to buy all of their fuel from OPEC, etc.

The US, on the other hand DOES have its own sources of oil. That makes a BIG difference. Local product costs less to market than having to buy foreign product to resell.

And if you want to get right down to brass tacks, the PRICE of fuel BEFORE taxes has little to nothing to do with the price of those taxes. The price of fuel and the amount of tax levied against that fuel is TWO vastly different things. The original comment about gas was directed specifically about the taxes paid on it, not the general price by itself.

European countries and Costa Rica are small. It doesn't take much gas to get to most places you might travel to regularly. In the US commuting distances are often long and the size of our country has made it difficult to have rapid transit covering all our major cities.

Opera now comes with an integrated ad-blocker; as I write, I can see the numeral 26 next to its icon, as in ads blocked on the page. In addition, one can add the EFF´s Privacy Badger to tackle tracking. At the moment, it detects 8 potential trackers that have been blocked either fully or partially.
Useful features.

Good idea and there are many free ad-blockers around, but a number of websites request you to disable your ad-blocker or they would not open their pages.

Yep, started using Opera as my default browser for testing a few weeks ago. One thing I noticed is their VPN, which I was curious about. So I enabled it. The way it works is that it routes you through the network and assigns a virtual IP address. This address changes, and shows the location as Alberta Canada.

I've been using a VPN with a lifetime subscription. The recent problem though, is that my ISP has started blocking my connection when they cannot see me. If I turn the VPN off, it's fine. If I turn the VPN and do regular browsing, it's fine. If I turn VPN on and open a private window, it works only until I close the other windows.

You might want to review your ISP terms of service. Not sure if it's legal for them to block access as you're paying them for a service.

When I was working, I had to connect into work through SSLVPN. Not quite the same thing as the VPN settings you are probably using. It could be just a setting in VPN. Maybe call the VPN technical support people if this was a paid subscription.

I think I'd be more apt to call the ISP and see what they say about the problem. They may pass the buck and if they do, you'll know just a little more about them, eh? But, yes, getting support from the VPN provider is the second step I would take if the ISP has no acceptable answers. Even if the ISP does help with the problem, I would still let the VPN know what's up. But, that's just me. YMMV.

Particularly Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who assisted Republican Senator Rand Paul in filibustering in the name of privacy (against NSA Metadata collection) a year or so back. Unfortunately, my Representative is a big government Pelosi lapdog (I guarantee you that Pelosi doesn't care about your privacy), so I'm stuck pestering my senators.

Look up J.S. Res.34 for the 115th congress and you can with some digging see who voted and how.

I did just that. I looked up "J.S. Res. 34 for 115th Congress" and found a list of sites about it 10 miles long. For the sake of expediency, could you please post the URL of the page you specified??? Thank you.

House
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2017/roll202.xml

Senate
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=115&session=1&vote=00094

If you don't want to read the list of Yeahs and Nays, just consider that if a senator has an R after his name, he voted Yeah. If he has a D, he voted Nay. You may want to ask your Republican senators how many of their constituents nagged them to vote Yeah on this issue prompting their ISP to sell their private information. Doesn't seem as though this is something anyone other than those making a profit would want.

That method only adds to the FUD. There were Democrats that were against the unenforced regulation, as well as Republicans for it. The only way to tell is by reading the voting record.

Also, check the facts about the regulation before making any claims about ISPs suddenly being allowed to sell private information.

It's NOT hard to go to those two links and see what is what. Anyone with a working brain can do it.

if you go to some vpn websites, alerts will go to the authorities to check you out. see what happened a few years ago with tor. who knows what the authorities are doing today.

https://www.propublica.org/article/heres-one-way-to-land-on-the-nsas-watch-list

everyone is so worry about isps, take a look at cnets own privacy policies and see what they collected. Most websites have similar polices.