Yes, potentially, your WiFi provider or a WiFi owner can see what sites you visit.
However, the ability to check what you do on WiFi depends on a variety of factors.
The main ones are:
- Type of router you were connected to
- Implementation of a TLS/SSL certificate on the website you visited
- Presence of an active VPN connection
Let’s also not forget that your WiFi provider can try to be using packet sniffing tools like, for example, WireShark.
From that point, everything gets way trickier, and therefore we strongly recommend that you should keep your VPN on all the time.
Old WiFi routers aren’t meant to be used for Internet traffic tracking on their own, meaning one would have to have some pretty extensive technical knowledge and a set of right tools to check your WiFi history through a router.
That being said, if you connect to a newer WiFi router that comes with a built-in tracking feature and pre-configured software, your browsing privacy will become very questionable.
So all-in-all, Internet history can be tracked on a WiFi router.
But when it comes to old routers, one needs to be somewhat tech-savvy to make this happen.
WiFi Browsing History: What Can Be Monitored
Unfortunately, things that can be monitored on WiFi aren’t limited to browsing history only.
There is much more what your WiFi provider can see.
For example:
- The exact time when you connected to the Internet
- Time that you spent online
- Time spent on a particular website
- Specific URLs you visited on a particular website
- Unencrypted HTTP websites data
- Source & destination IP addresses
