I was visiting a friends home who has wifi monitoring software, so when I used their wifi they could see what I looked at and what I typed on my texts. They live in Virginia. Now that I'm back home in Michigan, would there be a way for them to still monitor my phone internet usage or text messages even though I'm far away and not on same wifi? The husband is real tech savvy and if anyone would be capable of doing it he would. They all have macs and apple phones and I have an iphone as well.
Any info on this topic would be great, thanks!

I guess that using the LDS Church wifi could be monitored too?

I haven't been to an LDS Church in more than 20 years, but for those still attending could the church monitor them?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/17/2015 07:56PM by Senoritalamanita.

Yes I would like to know what the monitoring capability of a hosting entity is/could be. How expensive is the software and how typical is it for a hosting source to monitor your activity. Past or present.

As long as you are not connected to their WiFi they can't see you. That would include any texts or e-mail from you mobile device running from your data plan.

So when members connect to wifi on Sunday are they possibly being monitored?

Technically, how would someone monitoring know who is who?

If someone is checking the logs while someone else is asked to look up a particular site, then the device mac address will be the device logged viewing that site. So it would take a little planning or if there are a very limited number of users, that's much easier to figure out by elimination, like your friend's WiFi logs where your mac address visited places he and other residents wouldn't.

No, your friends will not be able to monitor you away from their network.
For this and when logging onto public wifi use a VPN (virtual private network). This gives you a private 'tunnel' that others cannot see. You can see different VPN software options here:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2390381,00.asp

The church WiFi does block several Exmo sites. When I still went I would use my phone as a 'hotspot' for WiFi to my iPad.

If the site is using ssl (http) others can't view your message either only the url.

They would only have been able to monitor your cell phone communications with a wifi sniffer if you were connected to their wifi - if you turned off wifi and used just your cell then they would need to have an imsi catcher (to spoof a cell phone tower) not that hard to do, but kinda hardcore and possibly illegal to do with out your consent.

They could do wifi snooping either through their home wifi router, having it log all packets that go through it, or by running a sniffer like wireshark. (what hackers do - great fun at airports - lots of pr0n :) )

Both @Redneck Wonderland and @Just Thinking are correct - So, first you should - on your phone browser and on every computer browser you use - install the plugin 'https everywhere' from EFF.org. That will insure that if the site you are going to offers it, you will automatically encrypt the communication between you and it. But, whoever monitors you *will* see where you are going. The URL request goes in the clear. So to hide that you need the VPN. With a VPN, not even the morg can block exmormon.org.

With VPNs, you first connect to the vpn, then all of your communication goes encrypted to the vpn - and from there out to where ever you want to go. Unless the people monitoring you locally are also monitoring at the vpn - the local monitors can't see where you are going, or any communications between you and your final URL.

A third way, (my goto when I'm traveling) is to ssh-tunnel - but that's more complicated if you're not familiar with terminals and shell scripting.

A lot of us use the following encrypted text apps - get all your friends to install these (whichever one you choose) and use it for all texts - because your cell phone is collecting every text message you send and storing it (possibly handing it to LEAs w/o a warrant - we've yet to find out all the details, though there are FOIAs trying to get them)

and definitely using it both to offer you ads, and to sell to other companies (Axciom, AdThis) who build profiles on you to sell to others to target ads to you,

so - go look at these apps - pick the one(s) you like -

Signal - you can use this to make encrypted calls too.
Silent Circle - phone
Silent Text - text
Wickr - text
Whatsapp - text

I can personally attest to the encryption and security properties of the top 4 - and I've heard good things about whatsapp's crypto, too.

.

Unless you have wifi calling on your phone enabled, they would not have been able to read your texts or other information sent using your phone's carrier network. Even if you *did* have WiFi enabled, SMS messages are still sent using a limited-but-functional encryption schema.

Now that you are home, they won't be able to do any phone monitoring of you.

From a functional standpoint, if you visit a site (such as this one), they'll be able to monitor what you post and what you view.

If you visit an https:// site secured via SSL, they can *still* see the parent URL. In other words, they'll know where you're going, but they won't know what content you're seeing. So if you visit a porn site, they'll know you visited a porn site, they just won't know what you watched while you were there.

Note that even SSL content is not secure if your friend uses an SSL intercepting proxy. Setting these up is a technical challenge and will trigger warnings in your browser, but many people will just ignore them.

VPN's are useful to some extent, but the content is only encrypted to where the VPN head-end is. In other words, if you use a VPN, you're hoping that your VPN provider is trustworthy as opposed to the person hosting the network you're using.

I have a Cisco router at home that I VPN into when I'm out and about.

Yes, ssl proxy MITMs are a problem. If this person is really tech-savvy and determined (I mean nosy) I could see him setting this up. - But, the most common ones are for corporate environments - the client machines are set to use the MITM proxy at the certificate validator.

she's not a client, so would get bad certificate warnings and could check. But, yeah even security consious people click through them. (guilty)

Some routers allow you to configure and use your home connection as the termination point for a vpn. If your firmware doesn't allow it you might be able to change it to 3rd party firmware like DD-WRT, openWRT, pfSense.

SSH is typically configured on a Linux or BSD operating system so it would need to be left on to use it.

With a VPN or SSH setup they would only see the IP or web address of the service/server you are using.