re: Using employer’s wifi on personal phone and tablet

I retired from a company that blocked almost everything. No Facebook, no Netflix, no Craigslist but oddly enough I could get onto TD. Had I posted, they could have seen it.

My phone plan has a good 5g connection most everywhere so I used it instead of letting the dark forces of the company look over my electronic shoulder.

It’s kind of retarded we have to even worry about this on personal devices, their wifi or not.

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To what extent can they tell what you’re doing? I believe they can see what sites you’re looking at but what more can they see? What about apps? Like say you’re watching HBO max in your downtime, can they see that? Anyone have any insight on this? Also, can they see what you search?

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i actually work in URL filtering.

real answer from somebody in the field.

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To what extent can they tell what you’re doing?

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do you see block pages if you go to an inappropriate site? or is it usually a free for all?

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I believe they can see what sites you’re looking at but what more can they see?

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any filter/firewall can see "he went to hbo.com, pornhub.com, google.com, etc. just via dns lookups

Unless they are decrypting, all they can see is "he went to google.com" without decryption, they can't see your searches. 99% of the web is SSL/HTTPS these days so unless they're decrypting, they'll just see abc.com and not much more than that.

when you got your phone or tablet on the network, did you have to install anything? Usually it's a certificate in your trusted root store that allows them to see the SSL traffic. most places aren't going to decrypt EVERYTHING because that would murder the CPU on their firewall/filter. It's usually selective.


regarding "do they know it's my device?" 2 questions:

when you got on wireless did they just give you a generic password that everybody has access to? or did you have to register with your company username and password? if username and password, or a splash page (like logging in at Starbucks) then yes they can associate your device to you. if it's a preshared key, then move on to the next question.

lastly, what's the name of your device? if it's "Sela's Ipad," they can see your IP address and then go look you up in DHCP and correlate if they have that configured.


my real answer is you probably don't have much to worry about. filters receive 1000s of blocks per second of people not actually doing anything bad. your phone is constantly reaching out to facebook, google, x, instagram, etc. you get notifications from them checking in, even if you don't have the app open.

i can look at a user that will have 1000 hits to facebook in a day and they weren't actually on the app, it's just phoning home.

HTH.

Setup your own VPN server at home and connect to it when you are away from home.