4 ms·

Hold up. GPS coordinates - yes, but not the sites visited. HTTPS traffic hides the URLs. This is the reason why I can't block anything with HTTPS in it from my

• ncmncm 7y ago
  You are wrong. You can hide content, except where the sender is mirroring it. You can hide your DNS lookup by using a DNS aggregator (are you?), unless you are using 1.1.1.1 or something, where the business model is harvesting. But unless you route everything through a foreign VPN, the phone company knows what site you asked for a connection to. And who owns that VPN, and what is their real business model? The bigger they are, the more their customer list is worth.
• tialaramex 7y ago
  Sites visited. Unavoidably if you aren't using Tor the network can see the IP address, which would pin down that this is say, Facebook or Wikimedia, or Porn Hub. On its own you can't be sure this is Wiktionary not Wikipedia, or which type of porn. In almost all cases the HTTPS traffic uses SNI (Server Name Indication) which deliberately carries the name of the server (the news.ycombinator.com in the URL you're looking at right now) in plain text. This enables Virtual Hosting - otherwise how would a bulk hosting company give you the certificate for bumsex.tinyblog.example rather than cats-in-boxes.example which are run by entirely different customers but hosted on the same cheap Apache server in a rack in Ohio? So that's enough to know it's the English language Wikipedia not Wiktionary or whatever. But yes, it's only the site and so they won't know (at least just from this) if you looked up Bowel Cancer or Elizabeth Warren; if you are watching a Youtube video about Minecraft or Venezuela; and so on. Medium term the plan is to deploy two technologies that mean the site's name isn't available, improving privacy. DPRIVE (encrypted DNS, often via DNS over HTTPS) and eSNI (Encrypted Server Name Indication) but while DPRIVE is complete and being rolled out (controversially as you may have seen right here on HN) eSNI isn't finished and is tricky to get right, it may be some years before you get much benefit. We need both for (hopefully) obvious reasons although DPRIVE already makes a lot of cheap censorship options impossible, and making censorship expensive makes it de facto unpopular in democratic countries where voters don't want to pay lots of money for something that seems mostly to inconvenience them. See also: popularity of the American TSA. Even after all that work is done though, if the mere IP address you're connecting to is enough to be a problem you must use Tor today, and then, and likely forever. Interestingly the Network described in Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" actually works exactly like Tor all the time, with (apparently) no way to directly send things to an address whatsoever. But this will always be more expensive to do with technologies we know about today, and so it is unlikely that we're destined to replace the Internet with a network that always behaves like Tor.
  • papito 7y ago
    I see now. IP. Of course... Thank you for the detailed explanation.
• snarf21 7y ago
  They see your DNS. If not, they see the IP (it has to be routed) and they can reverse lookup the DNS from the IP.