Can my internet provider know what I am doing on the internet (details inside)
I’m currently not living at home and I have to use an internet connection of a school. Every time I go to the internet I have to enter a certain ID and password. Each person’s ID and password is unique, and probably no one can use others’ ID and password.
It makes me wonder, is the internet provider watching each user’s activity on the internet? Do they know the websites I visit, the keywords I search on Google, the files I download, and even that I’m typing here asking if they are tracking me? I guess so, since this is a school and they need to keep their students in line, but I need solid proof.
Just curious.
I have been wondering about how public networks work, but I was motivated to ask this question when one friend claimed that they don’t know anything apart from who goes to the internet at the moment.
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6 Answers
It depends on their Information Technology (IT) people, the school policies and whether people follow those policies. A bored/snoopy IT tech who knows what they’re doing could observe all of that, yes.
I disagree with your logic though that “since this is a school [...] they need to keep their students in line”. I think that’s ridiculous and backwards, but is sadly how many think.
I think there’s a very good chance that although they could, they don’t, or rarely if ever will watch you. As I said, it really depends on how many bored, nosey, competent man-hours are being spent tracking how many people using school computers (likely either zero or a very low ratio), and whether they have any evil programs scanning traffic and flagging them for pattern matches, though if that exists, I’d expect it’s probably mostly set to try to detect porn.
I don’t know what school politics are like for you.
Are you still in Thailand? I know that schools here don’t monitor student activity, but if they want to go pull recent activity for a student they suspect of wrongdoing, they can do that.
I worked in school IT for a bit at the University I went to. And yeah, we logged lots of shit and were sent alerts if you were using things like Kazaa and bittorrent. Every URL you visited were logged.
And if it makes you feel any better we were so busy watching porn at work that we didn’t care if you did. Not only does your school know but so does every hop between you and what you visit.
If you are concerned I would look into a VPN. That will mask your traffic to the internet and the ISP your Uni uses.
Thanks for all your answers. I’m just curious if they monitor our activities like I always think. So the answer should be “Yes, they know what you are doing. They just don’t give a shit unless you do something terrible”. I have a VPN and Tor but it is a bit overkill for my situation I mostly search for learning materials and pretty images of film-noir actors. I also had my bittorent disabled before I came here I’m using a private tracker and torrenting here would just get my account banned anyway.
@Zaku, @Patty_Melt was talking to me. And @Patty_Melt, I’m still in Thailand and as far as I’m concerned, their culture is similar to mine and there would be little misunderstanding.
Your wisdom is most precocious, Viviane. ;-)
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