How does my ISP (that has an offer on data only for a specific website) know that I am using the internet for that specific website and not others?
In: 20
A couple of ways:
1) If it’s not about how much data you’re using in general, and is instead just a general offer (like, “Sign up for this site and we’ll give you a $10 discount for the next three months”), then odds are you are going to have to connect your ISP account and your Offer Site account to activate the deal.
2) If it *is* about actual data usage (i.e., data you use for streaming from YouTube doesn’t count against your monthly allotment), then it would be based on how much internet traffic they see between your house and that site. If you use a VPN it would render the offer useless, since they would no longer be able to see you connecting to that site, though, unless you set it up as an exception to the VPN connection.
Think of the internet like a mail system. If you want to communicate, you need a destination address, and a source address so they can send the information back. So your computer has to sent out a request: “Hey, I need information from www.google.com.” While the contents of the message is almost always encrypted and unknown to the ISP, the ISP HAS TO know the address because it has to know where to route it to to “deliver the letter.”
So all it has to do to block traffic to other sites is say, “Route information going to and from www.google.com. Drop all other requests.”
For the most part, it’s quite similar to post. They know you’re sending letters, and who you’re sending them to, and they know you’re receiving letters, and where they’re coming from, but they (assuming HTTPS) don’t know what’s inside the envelopes.
They need to know where the letters are going though, otherwise they wouldn’t get delivered to the right places
The internet works off of “IP Addresses”. Each site has one or more, and their owners are all known. When you connect to, for example, “example.com”, you send packets of data to the site; each packet includes the “IP Address” (which for example.com is 2606:2800:220:1:248:1893:25c8:1946)
The “IP Address” is necessarily exposed to the ISP — indeed, it’s the entire job of the ISP to take all the packets that you are sending, and then route them over to where-ever they are going based on the IP Address.
Let’s say you ask me for a book and I give you the right book, then you start reading the book.
Of course I know which book you’re reading, I’m the one who gave you the book.
Extremly simplified: your isp is your connection to the outer web, when you request Google.com, they see a request to that website. This is because the https encryption (the little “secure” padlock in the top left corner) doesn’t kick in until after you complete the handshake, and you can’t complete this handshake without first requesting, so up until that point your isp can see the data you’re sending
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