Yesterday, Taskmaster4450 wrote about the Helium network. His post indicated that 

>It is a project designed to provide people with internet access without having to go through an ISP.

[source](https://steemit.com/steemleo/@taskmaster4450/the-future-of-incomes-and-daos)


The idea intrigued me, as I have long wondered how an ordinary person could connect to the internet without dealing with ISP corporations and their exorbitant fees and spying. Color me paranoid, but I don’t have faith that encryption can stop them from seeing everything a person is doing (and recording it). But even if their supercomputers can’t break it (I doubt they release anything to the public they don’t have a door into), they can still see a lot such as where one goes and such. And anyone who is long in the tooth like I am knows these mega corporations don’t let little things like fines from regulations stop them from doing what they wish. At the least, we know they can do this.

https://hackernoon.com/what-youre-revealing-to-your-isp-why-a-vpn-isn-t-enough-and-ways-to-avoid-leaking-it-503816542951

As I said, this idea caught my fancy thinking I could break free from my ISP and their collection and sale of my data. So I re-steemed for later perusal and today got around to looking through their website. What I found left me quickly disappointed, as well as a little concerned for the intent behind this service. 

The first bad news being the hub they charge one 450.00 for only provides internet if you connect it to the internet through the ISP you pay. So you are actually only extending off of the signal you already are paying for, not escaping the ISP. Where this could get scary is any traffic that would be directed through that hub becomes your problem if one arises with your ISP, and possibly the authorities, depending on what those who connect to your hub are doing. 

According to the terms and conditions of Helium, you are responsible for the activity that takes place on the 450.00 hubs. Furthermore, you grant them license to

>Customer hereby grants Helium, during the Term, a worldwide, non-exclusive, revocable (as set forth in Section 9(c)), nontransferable, nonassignable (other than as set forth in Section 13), royalty-free license (without the right to sublicense) to access, use, host, reproduce, distribute, display, modify and prepare derivative works of all Customer Content solely for purposes of providing the Products to Customer, and to improve the Products (including the Service), which license extends to any third party assisting Helium in providing the Service.

[Source]( https://www.helium.com/terms-and-conditions)


On top of the 450.00 per hub fee, there appear to be monthly access fees one must pay, although I didn’t find anywhere on the site detailing what these monthly fees would be. However, they do say in the TOS I linked above that mention this that they have the right to terminate your service if you break their legalese TOS rules. So not only are you not breaking away from your ISP, you are buying expensive hub equipment AND paying an additional fee per month to access their service. 

And by accessing their service, it means paying them for the privilege of providing them with your wifi so they can charge a new layer to others for access to the hotspots. In return for this, they will pay you in tokens that may or may not gain any value at some future undetermined time. 

In the event you feel you were given the shaft by them, they have you agree to a nifty NDA (non-disclosure agreement), so you won’t be that pesky fly that won’t go away and warn others of your issues. And it appears if you decide to take legal recourse for any issues pertaining to your providing them with your wifi and content through their hub, you relinquish any protections you have under “The UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.” Instead, you agree to litigate any problems that arise “exclusively in a court located in San Francisco County, California and each party hereby submits to the personal jurisdiction of such courts.”

Through my perusal of their site, it remains unclear to me that general internet use is the intent behind this service, as it doesn’t appear capable of large data transmissions. It seems more focused on spying features such as dog tracking, apartment/hard goods monitoring etc. 

In the end, I don’t understand their terminology of being “the world's first decentralized wireless network.” It is dependent upon using your centralized ISP for transmission, and merely adds another layer (their hotspot) atop it allowing for one more step of data collection. There appears no way around using the monopolies the ISP hold. Sigh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=485JvexFxgs