and is there any way that i could minimize its “knowledge”?
In: Technology
In this day and age, here’s what your ISP can see.
First, they can see your DNS requests. When you access reddit.com, you have to make a request to know which IP Address reddit.com is. DNS is a plain-text protocol, so your ISP sees all that.
Second, they see the amount of traffic coming out of your modem, and the destination IP/Port of that traffic. If they know you access an IP associated with cornhub.com on port 443 and download 800TB of traffic from it each day, they know you’re downloading a lot of data via HTTPS from cornhub.com, even if they can’t see exactly what it is.
Third, for any website that doesn’t use HTTPS and just uses HTTP, they can see everything you access on it. They can see the specific page you’re requesting, they can see anything you enter in a form and submit.
As for other comments who say “Just use a VPN” — all you do is move the problem upstream to the VPN. At some point your traffic goes over the public Internet without any additional encryption beyond the protocol (i.e. HTTPS). You’re just changing who you decide to trust.
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