Hi there, I’m looking to get into self-hosting for privacy reasons and I wanted to ask y’all: how inadvisable is it to utilize an ISP-owned router/modem? I feel like they’re able to track everything I do online with their more than likely integrated spyware.
ISP can see your traffic anyways regardless if their router is at your end or not. In here any kind of ‘user behavior monitoring’ or whatever they call it is illegal, but the routers ISPs generally give out are as cheap as you can get so they are generally not too reliable and they tend to have pretty limited features.
Also, depending on ISP, they might roll out updates on your device which may or may not reset the configuration. That’s usually (at least around here) made with ISPs account on the router and if you disable/remove that their automation can’t access your router anymore.
So, as a rule of thumb, your own router is likely better for any kind of self hosting or other tinkering, but there’s exceptions too.
The ISP wouldn’t see your self hosted traffic. Not to mention many people don’t encrypt it if it’s on their own local network. And ISP tracking is becoming less successful with QUIC, Encrypted Client Hello, and DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS.
ISP obviously don’t see the traffic inside your own network, regardless of the router used. But as soon as you open any kind of connection over the internet, incoming or outgoing, your ISP has to have some information about it to route the traffic. DNS over TLS doesn’t hide that your browser opens connections to servers, they can see if you use wireguard to access your services (not which ones, just in general that there’s traffic coming and going) and even if you use VPN for everything they can still see the encrypted VPN traffic and, at least technically, apply pattern recognitions on that to figure out what you’re doing. And if you use VPN then your VPN provider can do the same than your last-mile internet provider, so you’ll just move the goal by doing that.
Last-mile ISP is going to be a middleman on your network usage no matter what you use and they’ll always have at least some information about your usage patterns.
Honest answer, why tf would s/o vote this down?
I’ve often wondered about down votes as well. It’s not the points, as I care nothing about that. However, if you’re going to down vote something, have the balls to explain why. Maybe the down voter knows something that we all can learn from. It just seems like a common courtesy to do so.
It might just be an error. It’s not too hard to hit one by mistake when scrolling on a touch screen device.
Could be. Not ruling that out. It seems to pile up tho on certain comments tho. Makes me wonder. I’m always down to be schooled. Shit son, ring the bell! Ahhh the internet.
This is why downvoting is fundamentally flawed. It could be “I don’t like it” all the way up to “I know for a fact that’s wrong,” but nobody else will ever know the rationale.
I don’t even see downvotes on my instance, and I never want to, because it just raises questions and confusion.
I’ve always liked the way slashdot handles comment rating. It’s a bit complicated, so maybe that’s why it’s not adopted elsewhere, but it gives a much more fine grained options instead of just up/downvote.
Oh, that’s an interesting way to do it. You’d probably have to have a handful of moderators each for the various comms, but it sounds like it would at least resist lazy engagement.
This. I think, waay back in the day, down voting was a way to filter bad information. Whenever I see a down vote on something I’ve said, I’m always left wondering if I gave erroneous information, was I out in the weeds smokin’ crack? I’m always down for being educated.