How Does an ISP Track Data Usage?

Secure VPN data connection It is already public knowledge that ISPs track their customers’ online habits and fingerprint their steps on the virtual world. This is done for different purposes like selling people’s data to advertising companies for profit, to find out whether a determined user has overcome their bandwidth limits, if they have been downloading and sharing copyrighted or illegal content and more. But what methods are used for to achieve this? What’s behind their magical abilities to keep every customer in sight and, most importantly, what can be done to prevent it?

Techniques and Tricks

One of the most common techniques used by an ISP to monitor its customers is RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service). In a very summarized explanation, this is a network protocol that provides centralized authentication and allows enterprises to manage, in this case, all accesses to their internal networks, wireless protocols and integrated email services.

On a larger ISP-like scale, this puts these entities in control of the internet since they incorporate modems, access points, DSL (Digital Subscriber Lines), and more. RADIUS, however, doesn’t allow ISPs to monitor data in real time. Instead, the software is configured to provide data consumption reports after a certain amount of time – every hour or so – and after a session is terminated.

However, this is only of the many methods that allow ISPs to track your traffic. Because technology is permanently evolving, many others already use different techniques for real-time measurements, allowing the throttling of a connection each time the user is streaming or doing any other activity that involves high amounts of bandwidth among other things. These techniques mean that ISPs can know which websites you visit, for how long you remained there, and many other details that help build a consumer profile that advertising companies are willing to pay good money for.

Avoiding Data Tracking

example of spying computer The best way to avoid all of these tricks is to place your data under reliable encryption, and the most convenient and easiest mode to do that is by purchasing a VPN. These tools make it so that all connections are established with military-grade encryption and because they also rely on the best protocols in the industry, speed loss is minimized as much as possible.

VPNs can additionally give users IP addresses from other countries, which allows them to fool geo-restricted websites without ISPs knowing about it. In fact, while ISPs do know that you’re using a VPN, they can only see your traffic up to the point that you start using it, at which point the data becomes heavily encrypted and impossible to crack without the key.

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