This post has been updated with official responses from both Virgin Media and TalkTalk.

When we talk about gadgets and technologies, the conversation too often revolves around how fast something is—how much faster the new contender is than the reigning champ and how its alacrity will somehow transform your everyday life. Speed is undoubtedly a useful metric—especially in cultures where consumerism and information addiction and the fear of missing out run rampant—but it can also dominate the dialogue to such an extent that we ignore important issues, such as privacy, security, and ethics.

Case in point: your connection to the Internet. Whether you connect via a telephone line, fibre-optic cable, or wirelessly, your Internet connection is probably one of your most cherished services. When your connection improves, it’s a pretty big deal. In the light of the Edward Snowden’s revelation of how intelligence agencies around the world collect vast swaths of Internet traffic, privacy and security policies have become more important than ever.

Here in the United Kingdom, we have a fairly healthy Internet access market. If you live in an urban area, it’s not unusual to have three or four competing, highly differentiated providers, offering a range of ADSL, VDSL, fibre, or wireless options at a reasonable price. As the big four (BT, Virgin, Sky, and TalkTalk) seek to become triple- or quad-play providers by bundling in television and cellular access, prices continue to fall. Competition has also been good for performance; the last three years have seen the country’s average download speed more than double from around 9Mbps to 19Mbps, mostly as a result of high-speed cable and VDSL networks deployed by Virgin and BT Openreach (a different company than BT the ISP).

Competition hasn’t been as good, however, for privacy and security. While it’s certainly nice to see a heated battle over pricing and bundled services, the UK’s big ISPs try to keep as far away as possible from conversations about security and privacy. Indeed, if you’re a customer of one of the UK’s bigger ISPs, your security and privacy are almost certainly in jeopardy.

Some ISPs are better than others, though—and after months of rigorous research, including off-the-record conversations with engineers and CEOs at many of the top ISPs, we have chosen the safest ISP in the UK. It was not a resounding victory—and once we explain the current state of the Internet in the UK, and the surveillance state that the ISPs are battling against, you'll understand why.

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