What does your ISP see when you’re using a VPN?

If you’re trying to hide your online activity from your ISP, it’s important to know what they can actually see when you are using a reliable VPN provider. While the most important data, like sites you have visited, is going to be hidden, some pieces of information are still going to be available for your ISP.

Before we begin, I wanted to give you a heads-up – there is no way for you to hide the fact that you are using a VPN. Your ISP is going to find this out sooner or later. If that’s your final goal – consider using the Internet via public Wi-Fi, while having your VPN always on.

Obviously, in that case – there is no way for any ISP to reveal yourself as someone who’s using a VPN. You can just use public Wi-FI in random places, so no one will ever find out you were connecting to a VPN.

Anyways, let’s get back to our main topic, which is: “What does your ISP see when you are connected via a VPN?”.

What information is visible to your ISP?

Even though you are browsing the web, downloading torrents, or watching your favorite show on Netflix through a VPN server, your Internet Service Provider will most likely see that you are using a VPN.

Now, if you choose one of the best VPNs, even this information will not always be available for your ISP. Most respected VPN companies usually offer a lot of servers for you to connect to, and they keep updating them, so your final IP address will always be different.

 

But, anyway, how can the ISP know that you are using a VPN?

• First of all, there are certain ports that are usually associated with the VPN connection. The ISP will be able to see the network activity via those ports.
• Secondly, ISP will often have a list of IP addresses that are associated with and used by VPN companies. ISP has a lot of channels they can get this info from, so there is no way for you to prevent this from happening.
• Besides that mentioned already, your ISP will most certainly see how much traffic you are using. This is just something you can never hide from them.
• Last but not least, your ISP will see all the data that’s traveling between you and a VPN provider, but, if you chose to use a trusted VPN, this data will always be encrypted and meaningless for your ISP.

What information is not available for your ISP when you are on a VPN?

While the previous section might have scared you, and you’ve started to lose hope of hiding your online activity from the ISP, you shouldn’t really worry that much.

The most important info about your Internet usage is still going to be hidden, and there is no way for your ISP to figure out what exactly you were doing when using a VPN.

Namely, your ISP provider will never find out the following data:

• What sites you’ve been visiting (even if those sites are not using the HTTPS protocol)?
• Have you been using torrents or not? No matter what torrents exactly. This data is traveling via an encrypted tunnel, so your ISP will never find out you were actually using a P2P connection.
• What streaming services you’ve been using and for how long. What shows you were watching?
• IP addresses of the remote hosts that you’ve been connecting to. Your ISP will not know what servers you were using after you’ve connected to a VPN.
• Your passwords, and login information.
• Your banking details and credit card numbers.

While most sites will utilize the HTTPS protocol to encrypt the data traveling from your browser to the site and back, there are still some sites that do not support HTTPS yet.

While we strongly recommend avoiding those types of sites when possible, using a VPN will make sure the data exchange between you and the non-HTTPS site will become encrypted and not visible to your ISP. If not using a VPN, such data will be available for your ISP in greater detail.

It is also important to know, most of the paid VPN providers will also offer their custom DNS servers, and those will be available for you automatically. This will make sure your ISP will not know what sites you were accessing. Otherwise, if not using a VPN, DNS data always stays nonencrypted and is available for your ISP.

What data will your VPN provider see?

Now comes the most important part. If your VPN provider hides a lot of Internet usage details from you, will they get access to that data? The answer is – YES! The VPN provider will get access to all that data it has hidden from the ISP.

Should you be worried about VPN providers misusing this information?

Well, yes, some providers do perform shady activities with your online data. That’s why you should always choose a reliable provider that has earned a reputation with years of flawless privacy protection. The most prominent providers that do actually hide your data from the ISP, while not misusing it, are NordVPN, and ExpressVPN. Another alternative – is ProtonVPN, but they’ve been established just recently.

Will VPN see your encrypted data, passwords, and banking details?

While the VPN provider gains access to all your data that travels to the Internet via their encrypted tunnel, they still won’t get access to previously encrypted data. That is if the site you are accessing supports the HTTPS protocol – this data is going to be encrypted, and not available to your VPN provider. More on that, in this case, the data will get double-encrypted.

Your passwords, login information, and credit card numbers – are all going to be encrypted by the final destination server, so there is nothing to worry about it. Just make sure to always use HTTPS websites to make sure all the sensitive data stays encrypted and hidden.

Are there any activity logs that are stored on a VPNs side?

Depending on the VPN provider of your choice, some of them might trick you, and store the logs of your online activity. This data can later be shared with online marketing businesses or other third parties that must not know this information. Even some government authorities might request that data, which may uncover something that you would prefer to stay private.

That’s why, it is recommended to use only zero-logging VPNs like the one from this list, to make sure your online usage never gets recorded.

How do you hide the VPN server’s IP address from your ISP?

Even though all the data that gets transferred between you and the VPN server will always stay encrypted, your VPN server’s IP address will still be visible to the ISP. But, what if you want to hide this information too?

Fortunately, there are just a few VPN companies that do offer a so-called “Double VPN” which offers double privacy by tunneling the traffic through 2 different VPN servers. The first server is used to transfer the data from and to your computer. The second server is sending and receives the data between itself and the first VPN server.

One of the best “Double VPN” providers that offer high security and privacy – is NordVPN.

Conclusion

After having all the points explained and clarified, you should now feel safe, when it comes to hiding your Internet activity from the ISP. While some of the data just can not be hidden, all the sensitive information will actually stay hidden. Your ISP will never know:

• what sites you’ve been using and why
• whether or not you’ve been using torrents
• your online banking details, passwords, credit card information
• streaming services details, and even the fact that you’ve been using them
• DNS servers you’ve been accessing
• the IP address of the server that you are connecting to via the VPN

The details mentioned above will always stay hidden from ISP, rendering it impossible to track what and how you’ve been doing on the Internet.