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perezeddie · Jul 18, 2006, 11:47 AM

If my neighbor allows me to use his wifi for free, can he view my surfing habits? He happens to be a computer programmer.

If so, is there any way to prevent him from seeing my surfing habits?

Thanks

ScottGem · Jul 18, 2006, 12:11 PM

Yes he can, no you can't. Since he has control over the router he can monitor the packets that go over it.

perezeddie · Jul 18, 2006, 12:48 PM

What does monitor the packets mean? You mean monitor the websites visited?

Thanks

Also, what if I delete my history and cookies info, can he still see my surfing habits?

ScottGem · Jul 18, 2006, 01:02 PM

Data is sent out to the Internet in packets. Any thing you send, URLs, credit card #s, IMs, E-mail etc. are placed into data packets with your address to identify them and sent to the router. He doesn't need to even look on your PC to monitor the packets that go through the router. There is nothing you can do to stop that. You might be able to keep him from browsing your PC by not sharing any resources, but you can't stop him from reading the packets.

cajalat · Jul 18, 2006, 06:04 PM

I'll have to slightly disagree with Scott. He can view your packets to some degree. For instance... if you browse say to http://www.somesite.com then he'll certainly be able to see every packet to include source/destination IP, source/destination ports, and the content of the packet. However, if you say browse to https://www.yourbank.com where the site is SSL enabled then he can see where you're going, when you're going there and for how long you stayed there but won't be able to see what you actually did on the site.

If you VPN to your work through your neighbor's connection then he'll see that you went to your work but won't be able to see what you did while you were connected to your work. He'll see the time and duration but that's about it.

So the bottom line is that if the connection is encrypted then he can't see what you're doing... he can only see that you went to site X, at Y o'clock, and stayed there for Z minutes/hours. That's about it.

What you can do to disguise your surfing habits is find a paid proxy service (or free) that does SSL. All he'll be able to see is that you're surfing to the same site all the time but has no clue what you really did.

Now... if you can't trust your neighbor then why not get your own connection? And then once you get your own connection, will you trust your ISP? Because they can certainly see what you're doing if they so desire.

Casey