I just got home from a weekend spent visiting my parents during which I used their wireless connection. I wasn’t visiting any morally questionable sites, nor do I think my dad would even look to see where I went, but I’d probably have a small amount of embarrassment if my dad saw every single website I visited.* It got me wondering, how much information does the average home network admin have about the sites people on the network view? Is it easy, without a great deal of additional software, to see what sites people on a network are looking at and how long they spend at each site?
I imagine that there is some variability in answers, so if the mods want to move this thread, please do.
ETA: FWIW, I run a mac with OS 10.5.6 and have my firewall up and my privacy set to stealth mode.
*Does he really need to know the amount of time I waste looking at icanhascheezburger pics or that I spend more time reading the fluffy bits of cnn.com than the parts with pertinent news?
I was looking for something that I could use to try and see if someone was stealing my wifi, by if there was any traffic to places that I wouldn’t go. With my router, I couldn’t find anything useful.
If he was motivated, and had the skills, he could track your Internet usage in exquisite detail, just by snooping the network. Back in the real world, he has a life and has better things to do with his time.
This very much depends upon the equipment one has. If I have a proxy server and force you through that, I can pretty much see everything you do that isn’t secure. In reality, I’ll only look at it if forced to.
If your folks have a typical WiFi router, and you were using your computer, there is essentially zero possibility that they could track your internet usage after the fact.
Even the cheapest routers I’ve seen have logging. If it’s enabled it would take very little work to track where you’ve been. MAC, ip assigned, ip visited. Depending on how much effort he wanted to expend he could do it.
I"m also wondering about this. I’m about to share service with my sibling, who actually works as a network administrator or at least technician, so I’m worried. The ISP (Verizon Fios) will be providing one wireless router that everything else will hook up to.
Netgear ones have a log, but I’m not sure if they log internet usage or just direct queries (i.e. DirectIP multiplayer games and P2P clients, which is all I’ve ever used it for). It certainly timestamps what it DOES log, as well as port and IP, but nothing a layperson could make sense of, and even for the technically minded you’re not going to get anything SPECIFIC* out of it unless you were already planning on being a BOFH that day and felt like hand-entering IPs into your browser window.
The only thing he could do is check the history tab, unless stealth mode (if that’s a browser feature and not an OS feature, I don’t know Macs that well) prevents it from showing up there.
*Well, you’d be able to get the gist of what type of site it was based on the ports (i.e. was it an FTP, did it have a lot of pictures, etc) or really specific stuff if you have an ecyclopaedic knowledge of ip addresses, in which case get on Wetten dass and put that to prize money winning use boi!
If he’s a network admin and he’s planning on sharing with you, depending on his personality, he may have a packet sniffer installed, whether he will use this for good (security) or evil (heckling you) is entirely based on what you know of his character.
You need to activate it - it’s not on by default. It’s also not very friendly. The logging offered by my WRT54G is just a big ugly table of IP addresses and times.
I believe what the OP is calling “stealth” browsing is actually called private browsing in Safari - all it does is leave no tracks on that computer - no files in the cache, no cookies and no history.
There are proxy services out there - you log into their site and you then go from there. The network you’re on only sees a connection to the proxy server.
As noted, most routers at least have the option of turning logging on. These logs are generally terse, and don’t track a huge amount of data (consumer routers don’t have much memory). A more serious admin would make the router log to another computer, but few people would go to that length.
I run a proxy/firewall at home, and my kids are aware that the server logs http traffic - I haven’t scanned those logs for years, though, and it has only been used to find a URL for my wife after she forgot a particular site.
Thank you for all of the answers so far. The gist I’m getting is that, unless he already has something set up which is counter to his personality, my dad can’t just pull up a list of what everyone using the internet at his house is doing. It isn’t a default. Even if he did have a log, it would most likely just be a list of IP addresses, not a list of every SDMB thread I’ve visited. Is that correct?
As far as stealth mode, so far as I know it’s a privacy setting on Macs. It’s accessed through the system settings through this path Security > Firewall > Advanced > Enable Stealth Mode. The description Apple gives of it in their help menu is as follows.
It seemed like a potentially useful piece of info to include in the OP.