A new wave of discussion was sparked by a video from a social media user who claimed to have experienced an unusual invasion of privacy.
“Why did no one tell me that someone can access your internet search history through Wi-Fi?” he asked.
The video was also shared by cybersecurity influencer Caitlin Sarian. According to her, the situation is a good example of what an invasion of privacy can look like today.
“Imagine this: you’re at home, using Wi-Fi, and someone is secretly looking through your search history,” she said.
The concerns seem particularly serious given how heavily people rely on wireless networks. According to available data, Wi-Fi carries nearly 90% of all data traffic on consumer smartphones in the US. This might make it seem as though a network owner could easily uncover even a user’s most private browsing habits.
However, experts say the reality is not quite that simple. Karolis Kaculis, Lead Systems Engineer at Surfshark, explains that search history is not stored directly “in” a Wi-Fi network. Still, someone with administrative access to the network can monitor the traffic passing through it.
Most modern web traffic is encrypted. As a result, a network administrator generally cannot simply open and read the contents of a webpage or see everything a user enters on a website.
There is an important catch, however: encryption primarily protects the content of the data itself, rather than the metadata associated with network connections.
This means an administrator may be able to see the IP addresses a device connects to. Since certain IP addresses are often associated with specific services, this information can reveal which platforms a person has been using.
The Domain Name System, or DNS, can reveal even more. DNS is responsible for translating familiar website addresses, such as google.com, into the numerical IP addresses needed to establish a connection.
The problem is that DNS requests are still often transmitted through unencrypted channels. If an administrator logs these requests, they may be able to see exactly which domains a user attempted to access.
According to Henry Fisher, founder and CEO of Techlore, a network operator can potentially see which websites a person visited, when they visited them, and how long they spent there. They can also access a significant amount of metadata associated with those connections.
The actual search queries, however, normally remain hidden.
“The network sees the envelope, not the letter,” Fisher explained.
In other words, a Wi-Fi owner may be able to tell that someone accessed a particular website or service, but that does not mean they can automatically see exactly what the person searched for, read, or entered there.
There is one important exception. This applies to managed devices, such as work or school laptops. If IT administrators have installed a special certificate on the device and configured it accordingly, the organization may be able to inspect the contents of network traffic, including search queries.
Public Wi-Fi networks also require extra caution. Khalil Ibrahim Dursunoglu, a computer science and cybersecurity expert at Western Michigan University, notes that HTTPS provides a significant level of protection, but users should not rely on it alone.
Users should not ignore browser warnings about certificate problems. They should also avoid suspicious Wi-Fi networks designed to imitate legitimate access points and should never install certificates or software requested by an untrusted network.
Even when an administrator cannot directly see the contents of encrypted traffic, the metadata they collect may be enough to build a surprisingly accurate picture of a user’s online behavior.
Kaculis explains that combining destination IP addresses with unencrypted DNS requests can allow a network administrator to create a detailed profile of a person’s browsing activity.
“While technically this is not a log of your ‘search history’ in the way your browser stores it, it provides enough information to create a rough equivalent of a user’s internet activity,” Kaculis said.
Simply connecting to someone else’s Wi-Fi, therefore, does not give the network owner full access to your browser history. They cannot simply open a list of all your search queries, although under certain circumstances they can gather enough information to determine which websites and services you have been using.
For those who want to minimize the amount of information visible to a network administrator, experts recommend following several basic precautions:
Keep your devices and browsers up to date.
Use websites that support HTTPS.
Enable encrypted DNS where appropriate.
Secure your home Wi-Fi network with WPA2 or WPA3 and a strong, unique password.
Change the router’s default administrator credentials.
Enable multi-factor authentication for important accounts.
When using untrusted networks, a VPN can provide an additional layer of protection.
“A trustworthy VPN can provide an additional layer of privacy on untrusted networks because it encrypts traffic between the device and the VPN provider,” Dursunoglu explained.
Ultimately, the owner of a typical Wi-Fi network does not have direct access to a user’s entire search history. However, IP addresses, DNS requests, connection times, and other metadata can reveal enough information to build a fairly detailed picture of a person’s online activity.
