Will putting HTTPS:// in front of a URL prevent my ISP from being able to tell which sites i have visited?

Question

At the moment my landlord is paying for my internet but they monitor which sites i go on and they said that they will block any sites which have been used to download too much stuff
If i put HTTPS:// in front of the web address will that stop them from being able to see what sites ive gone on?

Answer 1

No. Your ISP just sees packets to different addresses, and the address will still be visible even with https. But of you use https to a NON encrypted site it will not get you there. You can only use https://for secure sites, which have to be offering https://service. Since this is an additional load on the server most sites do not use it for default services. They may use it for sign up or login pages, but not always, but they should use it for any payment system, or for anywhere critical information like bank account or credit card is required, otherwise it is visible to anyone scanning their site.

Answer 2

No. https designates that you want to use the secure version of the website **as created by the website owner**. If the owner of a website has not created secure, https, pages, then you will usually get an error message. In any case, this does not disguise the address, just the content. Further, if your bandwidth usage (downloads and uploads) is being monitored, they don't need to know what sites you are visiting, just how much traffic is being transmitted across their system.



Even if you were able to block the information about which sites "have been used to download too much stuff," they still would figure out that "too much stuff" was being downloaded from somewhere and likely would just cut off your access altogether.

Answer 3

THEY DON'T CARE what sites you are visiting ONLY 'if you download too much stuff' ..



By which they mean using Torrents to download whole (pirate) movie DVD's or lots of high quality streaming video ... or (perhaps) playing on-line games 24x7 ..



FYI - whilst ISP's may well be able to 'list' all the site you have visited, what the landlord will get is NOT millions of web access == ONLY Date/time + "Giga bytes of traffic" ...



and there is nothing you can do to 'hide' the gigabytes of downloading :-)

Answer 4

I am afraid not.

HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP but does not hide your activity.

Your landlord (if he knows what he is doing) will probably be monitoring your usage via his router and you cannot bypass this as far as I am aware.

If any sites are blocked then it may be possible to bypass the block by using a proxy to access a web site.

Answer 5

No it won't. Use google chrome Incognito if you wanna prevent them from tracking which sites you actually go to. I think they're able to track how much download space you're taking up as well.. I'm not a computer wiz but if anything you could just find a bunch of things you wanna download and download them at say 4am in the morning. Make sure it's worth the while l0l.