I will be renting an apartment and the wifi is provided by the owner. Surely they have access to the router etc, so they can see my logs.
Question is, if I use a VPN, what can they see? They can only see that I connected to one IP address (The vpn’s ip address) and nothing else, yes?
They will see hot much data you download, 2GB, 5GB, etc, and connection time, many routers log this, but they won´t know what it is other than you are using a VPN.
yes, but…
talking as someone who manages the wifi router i share with neighbors;
most routers have the ability to turn off logging to improve performance,
however - they will still see what when and major web hosts * used and
how much total up/down traffic each MAC-ID device is using
this means - they won’t know what url’s you visit *
only which company is hosting their content, such as
microsoft, amazon web services, google, cloudflare etc.
any 1 client using a vpn, only that vps ip will show up.
so if you want privacy, best to get your own router
(any older AC dual channel for $60 will do this)
set it up as a wisp or access point with it’s own ssid.
(it’s what smart travelers do when using any hotel wifi)
that way your connection will show up as always on
no web host id’s shown, just total down/up from the
mac-id of the router itself can be seen by it’s owner.
You need a Kill Switch to prevent leaks… results may vary
It really depends on how the VPN is setup. The answer is yes mostly, just make sure dns gets tunneled as well otherwise they will see your domain lookups.
Will VPN hide my logs completely?
“Your” logs? You must mean logging of your usage, because any of ‘your’ logs would be on your own device. So to clarify, the router would keep its own logs of your overall traffic usage as others have described but if your device does its own logging, that would not be available to them.
Other than that clarification I think others have already described it accurately.
One thing to consider: the owner is going to be legally liable for anything you download. If you do it on their network, they are the people that will be contacted by their ISP if anything goes sideways (DNS leak, etc).
A VPN should mask your traffic, yes, but there are other data implications here, mostly being the fact that all your data will be going through someone else’s network.
If you’re just trying to be private on someone else’s network - you’re probably okay. But it is a slightly weird scenario, and if you’re downloading anything that could get you in DMCA legal troubles, then having other parties involved- especially a landlord - could get messy. If it’s a temporary solution, I think that’s fine, but wouldn’t recommend it as an ongoing solution if there is any regular activity that has implications of possible lawsuits.
I think when you’re doing anything that is meant to be private, you want to be in control of as many of the variables as possible.
Does this require that your router plug in directly to the modem with an ethernet cable or no?
He using a VPN actually prevents the owner from being legally liable for anything he downloads since the IP he will be using isn´t to be linked to the ISP, it will be linked to his VPN.
For travel routers, I would seriously recommend the hardware by GL.iNET. Many of their routers come packaged with open source firmware such as OpenWRT, and they allow you to compile your own firmware if you wish. Several of their routers accept 4G sim cards and have support for wireguard and OpenVPN out the box. I would stay away from anything with proprietary firmware, such as the products from Huawei, ZTE, Gemtec, etc, as they are notoriously unsecure. See here:
no, a wisp or access point can be over wifi as well.
when you setup a wisp router, it’s going to ask you
for the name/pw of the ssid of the owners router,
and what name/pw you want to use for the ssid
of the wisp’s own wifi hosing. then whatever is
hosted on the wisp’s wifi will get backhauled like
a wan port via wifi back to the owners router,
but it will appear as one single mac-id to the owner
no matter how many devices the wisp’s wifi hosts.
you don’t even have to assign a different subnet
since every client is using dhcp of either router
depending on which name/pw ssid it’s using.
Yeah I know that if done correctly- he should have no problems. But a lot of people using VPN’s don’t actually use them correctly and they still leak their IP. But if they’re asking here, I think there is a decent chance that people don’t know how to make sure they’re following best practices.
I’ve known people who have been jammed up by this type of thing in the past. So, just fair warning.
My point is that using someone else’s copper wire, there’s a chance of things you don’t control happening. And that is either a bad thing (blind spot) or good thing (a layer of obfuscation), depending on your intent.
Hey sorry for asking an unrelated question but you seem knowledgeable on the subject I use a cudy LT400 router it just uses a 4G SIM card and the router has vpn settings but with the SIM card I’m locked into nat type 3 which sucks for wanting to play co op games would a VPN allow me to get around that and play co op games because the VPNs nat type is different