What Can My ISP See?

Unless you are paying your bill or having connectivity issues, you probably don’t give much thought to your Internet Service Provider (ISP). But, you might want to take a minute to think about what your ISP knows about you. Despite the privacy precautions you take, your ISP may be able to see everything that you do on-line.

Of course, there probably isn’t someone sitting behind his desk at your ISP watching every click you make, but that doesn’t mean your browsing history isn’t getting stored somewhere on their systems. Your ISP tracks your clicks for a number of reasons. For them, your browsing history is a revenue stream. Many ISPs compile anonymous browsing logs and sell them to marketing companies.  What’s more, the data your ISP collects may be accessed by outside organizations, such as the police department or another government agency. If provided with a subpoena, your ISP is legally required to provide whatever information they have on you.  

Some of the things that your ISP knows about you include:

1. The exact web-sites you visit
If the web-sites you visit are unencrypted, (i.e., they still use HTTP and not HTTPS), your ISP will know the exact sites you visit. If the web-sites you visit use HTTPS, all your ISP will see is that you visited the site, but not what you do on it.

2. Your emails
If you use an email service that doesn’t use Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption, your ISP can likely see the contents of your emails, and if your ISP is also your email service provider, they definitely can.

3. Whether you’re using BitTorrent
Your ISP can see when you use BitTorrent to download files, even if they are legal (a game update, for instance). While they may not care so much about the contents you’re torrenting as much as some corporations (who can see your IP address from the torrent, mind you), once the ISP notices you’re using bandwidth for torrenting they might throttle your download speeds.

Your ISP can see all unencrypted data that you send and receive. Remember this, and take precautions to mask your on-line activities from your ISP.

Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) can keep your ISP from seeing what sites you are connecting to on-line, as can connecting through TOR.  While your ISP will be able to tell that you connected to the TOR network (you can mitigate this by using bridges), they can't know what hidden services you're visiting, nor what content you are sending or receiving through the Tor network.  Accessing the Internet through an anonymous proxy, using an HTTPS connection can also help mask your on-line activities.  

Check that every site has HTTPS. Use HTTPS Everywhere. Use an email with TLS encryption. Better yet, use an email service that won’t keep track of your messages. Using an encrypted e-mail service such as Protonmail or Tutanota can help safeguard the content of your e-mail messages. Create inbound traffic by playing audio streams when you’re not at home, and create outbound traffic by sharing popular files through file-sharing services.