Maintaining privacy when browsing the Internet is something that users are very concerned about. We already know that our personal data has great value on the net. They can be used to include us in spam campaigns, send targeted advertising according to our interests or even sell it to third parties. There is a question that many users ask themselves: can the Internet operator know which pages the users visit? We are going to talk about it.
An Internet operator can “see” what the user does
Normally our Internet operator will have the ability to know a lot about what we do on the Internet. They may have a record of the DNS requests we make. This is so since many requests go unencrypted, so they could know which sites we visit. They may also have information on certain files that we download. This is what happens if we use P2P or Torrent networks . They could know, for example, if we are downloading any pirted programs.
Keep in mind that one thing is the information that we send and receive on a website and another is the requests. That is, if we browse HTTPS pages , the operator will not be able to see the messages or data that we send and receive. The pages in this case are encrypted. However, the DNS request that we send to enter that website is not.
Therefore we can say that yes, our Internet operator could know which websites we visit. An operator could even block access to certain web pages through DNS. For example, it could prevent us from having access to foreign content, such as a streaming service for series and movies.
We must also bear in mind that, although the communication on the webs is carried out via HTTPS, we always have to send the domain to which we refer in clear text, this is in the SNI field, and the operators also examine it to determine if we are trying to access websites that are blocked by court order. ECH implementation is already underway so that this is also encrypted, ECH is the successor to ESNI which in turn is the successor to SNI.
How to prevent the operator from knowing where we navigate
There are many tools that we can use to improve our privacy on the Internet. We have at our disposal many programs that can prevent our data from ending up filtered on the network and available to anyone. But we can also prevent the Internet operator from knowing where we surf.
An example is VPN services. They are widely used today to improve privacy on the Internet. Very interesting to connect to Wi-Fi networks that may not be entirely secure. For example a wireless network in a shopping center. We can encrypt the connection and our data is safe.
A VPN can prevent the Internet operator from knowing which sites we are visiting or if we have downloaded files through P2P networks. We have a wide range of possibilities in this regard. There are them for desktop operating systems and also mobile devices. There are also both free and paid.
Another option we have to prevent the Internet operator from knowing where we are browsing is to use the Tor Browser browser . Its layer system allows us to hide our IP when entering a website and in this way we browse in a totally private way, without being able to see which sites we visit.
Therefore, an Internet operator could know which sites we visit, but we also have options to avoid it. We have named a couple, such as VPNs or the Tor browser. We leave you another article where we talk about how they can track us in private mode.