Bad news for anyone concerned about their privacy who lives in or plans to visit Indonesia in the near future. As authorities ramp up their efforts to combat illegal online gambling and pornography, online privacy suffers as a result.
DuckDuckGo, a private search engine, is the first casualty.
On Friday, August 2, 2024, government officials told Reuters that the safe search engine had been disabled due to increasing complaints about online gambling and pornography content in its search results. According to local reports, the government intends to restrict access to free VPN services as part of a nationwide crackdown on criminal online activities.
Privacy at risk
As mentioned before, DuckDuckGo is a privacy tool that millions of individuals across the world use every day to browse anonymously and secure their private data. Enforcing a ban on its use deprives people who reside in or travel to Indonesia of a useful tool for protecting their online privacy.
Access to the top VPN apps is also at risk, which is a recipe for disaster in terms of privacy. A virtual private network (VPN) is a type of security software that encrypts your internet connections and masks your IP address location. While both functions increase your online privacy, the latter also allows you to access geo-restricted content.
This means you may not be able to use a streaming VPN to continue viewing your favourite TV series when travelling across the country. Worse, citizens and travellers will be unable to circumvent the current internet limitations. Indonesia, home to the world's biggest Muslim population, has strong restrictions against sharing unlawful or obscene online information. This is why, in addition to gambling and pornographic websites, social media platforms such as Reddit and Vimeo have been blocked.
Given that the ban on free VPNs is not in effect at the time of writing, using a VPN remains the easiest way to circumvent internet restrictions and continue using DuckDuckGo, Reddit, and any other services that are currently banned.
After you've downloaded your preferred app, all you have to do is connect to a server outside of the country - security experts suggest one in a region where internet access is unrestricted. This will trick your internet service provider (ISP) into believing you are in the same location as the server and, as a result, allow you access.
