Does using a VPN stop your ISP being able to see your IP or seeing who you are?

Question

I ask this not for my own personal gain, it's just me and my friend are discussing this and he thinks that it will stop your internet service provider seeing what you are doing, whereas I believe that even though your true IP address is hidden when you use a VPN, your ISP can still tell that its connection is being used, and who the specific connection is contracted to, as you've signed up to their services.

Please tackle the question in two parts:

1) If you use a VPN, can your ISP still see your IP address?
2) If you use a VPN, can your ISP still see who you are/tell which registered user is using the connection?

Thank you very much for your time.

Apologies if this question is in the wrong section.

Krowten Nimda · Answer

1) Yes. The VPN will hide the ultimate destination of your traffic. However, your real IP is still used to get a connection between you and the VPN endpoint. So while an ISP won't see what you are doing, they will see your traffic going to a VPN endpoint.

2) Not sure what you are getting at. If you require a username/password to connect to their network, then yes.

VPNs work by giving you an IP address for a virtual network. When you connect to a website through the VPN, the source of the traffic is your VPN IP and the destination is the website's IP. The VPN then encrypts all the data to be sent. The encrypted packet then uses your real IP as the source and the VPN endpoint as the destination. The data is sent the VPN, where the outer IP information is stored in a table, the inner packet is decrypted, and the original packet is sent. The process reverses itself for the return traffic.

Hope this helps.

adaviel · Answer

If you don't use the IP address your ISP gave you, your internet connection won't work. You might be able to send some UDP packets out that appear to come from a different customer, but you won't get any replies.

Using a VPN will prevent the ISP seeing what you are doing, yes. Instead, it lets the VPN company see what you are doing - that's better how ?. If you are using a "free" VPN, you have no idea whether they are trustworthy or whether they are going to log everything and report it all to the police as theft of computer resources, or think it would be funny to replace your downloads with viruses.

? · Answer

if it's correctly set up and utilize a secure protocol, all your traffic will get through the VPN and your ISP won't be able to decipher your online activities and make sense of your internet traffic.

In other words, you may be using the VPN to connect to websites A, B, and C and send all sorts of interesting information to those websites; or send email; or whatever. Your ISP can see none of that. All they can see is encrypted data that they can't decrypt. So they know you're using a VPN, but they don't know what you're using it for.

Anonymous · Answer

it has been your VPNs work setting a  IP address for a virtual network. When you connect to a website through the VPN.

Anonymous · Answer

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Anonymous · Answer

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Anonymous · Answer

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Does using a VPN stop your ISP being able to see your IP or seeing who you are?

7 Answers