Can Your ISP Spy on Your Search History? The Truth Revealed
In this video, I discuss what your internet service provider (ISP) is able to see when it comes to your search history, and also what you can do to protect it. To learn how to change your DNS settings so your ISP can’t spy on your search history, check out this video: • Privacy Hack: How to Protect Your Search H... To see how you can encrypt your DNS requests, check out this video: • Stop Snooping: How to Secure Your DNS with... For more content on similar topics, check out my YouTube channel: / @network-from-home If you would like to read about other ways to improve your home network, check out my blog: https://www.network-from-home.com 0:40 Can your ISP see your internet search history? 2:10 How your ISP sees what sites you go to 5:21 What your ISP does with your search history 6:42 Can you prevent your ISP from seeing your search history? Can your ISP see your search history? By default, your ISP can see your search history, but only to a certain extent. To be specific, your ISP can see the websites that you travel to, but not the specific actions that you take on a given website. On top of that, in many cases your ISP is not able to see the specific pages you travel to either. Your ISP is able to do this because by default, your router uses your ISP’s domain name system (DNS) servers when searching for websites. The purpose of DNS servers is to determine the IP address for a given web page (e.g. CNN.com). In order for your computer to travel to a website, it needs to travel to the IP address of the website (not the domain name). Domain names were simply created to make it easier for you to go to your favorite websites, as opposed to having to memorize the IP addresses of all the websites you frequent. So every time you search for a website that you’d like to go to, your ISP’s DNS server finds the IP address of that website and sends it back to your computer. This allows your ISP to track every website that you search for, thus revealing your search history. The good news is, you can hide your search history from your ISP. If you want to hide your search history from your ISP, you can: •Use an independent DNS server (e.g. Cloudflare) •Use a VPN •Encrypt your DNS queries Although your ISP may be able to see your search history currently, it doesn’t have to be that way. I will be making follow up videos detailing how to make your search history private, so stay tuned! Conclusion If you have any questions about your search history privacy or what you can do to protect it, please leave a comment below.
