What Your ISP Can See and How to Keep It Private
Your internet provider connects you to the web and, along the way, sees part of what you do online. Let’s look at exactly what it sees and how to keep that private.
What your ISP sees without a VPN
- The domains of the websites you visit (from DNS queries and connection metadata).
- When you’re online and how much data you use.
- The IP addresses of the servers you connect to.
Your ISP can’t read the content of pages on HTTPS sites, but it does see the list of domains and the metadata. That’s enough to build a picture of your interests.
What a VPN changes
With a VPN on, your ISP sees just one thing: an encrypted connection to the VPN server. The domains you visit travel inside the encrypted tunnel and stay hidden from your provider. Instead of a browsing history, all that’s left is a single opaque channel.
An important caveat: trust in the service
A VPN shifts the point of trust from your ISP to the VPN provider. That’s why the logging policy matters: a trustworthy service keeps no record of your connections or the sites you visit. OzodVPN follows a strict no-logs principle: we don’t log your internet activity, and only your total traffic volume is counted for billing.
A few more tips
- Use modern protocols: they do a better job of concealing what your traffic looks like.
- Don’t sign in to services under your own name if you want privacy from those services themselves: a VPN hides the connection, not the account you log in to.
FAQ
Can my ISP tell that I’m using a VPN?
It sees an encrypted connection to a server, but not what’s inside it. What you open inside the tunnel stays hidden from your provider.
Try OzodVPN
Encrypted traffic, no logs, modern protocols. Three days free, no card required.