Every day that we enter the Internet we leave a fingerprint or digital trail. However, the information that the Internet operator can collect from your browsing is also important and in large quantities. For example, it could know the websites you visit very easily, especially if you use their DNS servers. Those are some of the things you could collect, but there is still more, such as the hardware you are using or information related to your social networks.
Does my Internet provider monitor my browsing?
If you wonder if an ISP (Internet Service Provider) can monitor your Internet browsing, the answer is yes. Also, in some cases, they are required to do so by law.
In 2006, the European Union gave the green light to the Directive on data retention, which required ISPs to store their users’ data for a minimum period of six months and a maximum of two years. In the end, the Court of Justice of the EU in 2014 declared this regulation invalid. The reason was because it affected the fundamental rights of respect for private life and the protection of personal data. In the end Directive 2006/24 / EC ended up being repealed.
However, Internet providers continue to collect a large amount of data from their customers, in addition, under court order, operators can intercept all communications in their entirety, including their customers’ browsing. Keep in mind that when a crime is committed, the data may be required from that ISP.
Also, keeping track of your browsing history is easy for an Internet Service Provider. The moment you connect to the Internet, you do so through a public IP provided by them. To that we have to add that the WiFi router that we have on many occasions is from that provider. On some occasions, for example, they can check on those computers if our connection is good or they have to modify any parameter.
By default, most Internet queries are made through your ISP’s own DNS server, since the most basic users do not usually change their DNS for others such as Google, Cloudflare or others. Those requests are almost never encrypted which means that ISPs can see, log, and keep track of every website you visit. If you use protocols such as DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS, all this will be encrypted point to point, so the operator will not be able to “see” DNS requests, as long as you do not use their DNS servers, of course.
What does the Internet operator know about your browsing
Now is the time to find out what the Internet operator can collect from your browsing. In this case, our ISP knows much more about us than we might expect at first. The usual information that Internet providers collect about us is the following:
- Our public IP address, when we get it and when we leave it.
- The web pages we visit because DNS requests are normally unencrypted.
- Torrents downloads, Emule and the use of P2P programs.
Navigation today goes through HTTPS, this means that it is encrypted point to point, and although it is captured, it is not easy to decrypt, for this reason the operator will not know what you are doing within a web if you use this protocol, but yes, the webs where you browse because DNS requests go unencrypted.
As you can see, with all this information collected, a detailed profile of us can be created. Knowing our tastes, they can offer us, for example, products we like, encouraging consumerism. This information becomes a valuable source of business. From the criteria adopted by our ISP, our privacy will be more or less exposed.
With the case of Edward Snowden in June 2013, what was happening began to be revealed to the general public. Thanks to his information, it was discovered that the NSA collected a large amount of data from US citizens. It should also be noted that they did it with the help of the main providers and the Internet. Legally your activity on the Internet could only be seen with a court order.
In the case of having looked for a new job or you had a serious serious illness. What if your current boss knew? Imagine, for example, that you are pending a contract renewal or are going to restructure the company’s workforce. In that situation, it would leave you in a very complicated place if your boss handled that information.
Currently, our browsing histories tell a lot about us. Anyone who has that information can make a very detailed picture of who we are simply by observing what we do on the internet.
Who can collect what I am doing on the Internet?
The first and which we have already talked about before, are the Internet service providers (ISP) . They can see the websites we visit, the social networks we use and other content. They can then save that data from six months to a year (or more), depending on the local legislation in force in that country.
Another would be the administrator of our network , you could also see the websites we visit, the social networks we use and the videos we watch. In this category we could say that your hehe / company enters. Depending on your network configuration, you could even install a proxy in your organization to capture all inbound and outbound traffic.
We also have websites that, thanks to cookies, can sometimes personalize ads and adjust them to suit our tastes. In addition, we have Internet search engines , which store our search history. For example, Google, has data from all the platforms on which we use our Google account. And in the case of Facebook, you can do a pretty exhaustive crawl because a lot of websites use its “Like” plugin, and the crawling on your part is really easy.
Finally, we would have governments and legal institutions that could request the Internet provider to hand over our browsing data, and track online behavior to fight cybercriminals.
What additional information can they obtain thanks to our browser
Thanks to our Internet browser, you can get quite sensitive information about us, and it is critical to use a browser that protects from tracing and does not send private information like Firefox.
Our browser collects a large amount of data about the hardware of our equipment and the software that we have installed. In this way it obtains information about the operating system that we use, our IP address, or the add-ons and extensions that we have installed. In addition, if we focus on the hardware, it stores information as important as the installed CPU, the GPU, or the battery of the computer. Thanks to our web browser they could also easily locate us, even without giving permission to a device to use our GPS it can estimate our location quite accurately.
On the other hand, there is the browsing history, for example, if it is synchronized with your Google account, the Internet giant has access to that data. Therefore, we recommend that from time to time we clean the data that is automatically stored in our browser, but it is more important to use a browser that allows us to have privacy.
How we can maintain privacy to navigate
We know what the Internet operator can collect from your browsing and it is in your hands to avoid it. One of the ways that we can use is to use a VPN service that guarantees our privacy, and that all traffic that goes to the Internet is encrypted and authenticated, so that not even our operator can obtain information. The downside of this option is that for us to be really calm we will have to hire a paid one, or use WARP from Cloudflare that promises privacy and has a no-logs policy.
Some of the most recommended services to protect our privacy on the Internet are the following, they all have a large number of tools to protect our browsing, such as Kill-switch, a large number of servers in different countries to which we can easily connect, and they even have apps for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
Finally, we could use apps such as Ghostery Privacy Browser and Firefox Focus for Windows Tor Browser or Android apps, in order to further protect our privacy on the Internet.