can anyone track my ip address and see what iam browsing?

[Lee]

hi, iam using home internet and i would like to know that can anyone view what iam browsing? can anyone track my ip address say from yahoo answers and see what sites iam seeing?
also does my internet service provider know what i browse? if yes how can i stop it.

[Haley1213]

people can do anything these days!

[Mc - Design Guru]

Yes, it is possible to a certain degree. Certain providers and routers can trace the sites while others can merely see what IP's is going through it. If you mean someone random trying to see your viewing history it isn't possible.

[Ben]

The Internet works through a relay system- when you type in a website, you go to a server (usually provided by your Internet Service Provider, but you can specify a different server if you choose) to look up the IP address of the website you're trying to visit. Then, your computer sends out a message addressed to the website. The message first hits one of your ISP's routers, which chooses which direction to send it. It then hits some other routers, either owned by your ISP or by one of the tier one ISP providers (the ISPs that connect other ISPs together), until it hits its destination. The destination server then reads the message and responds to you. Of course, your own IP address needs to be in the message in order for the server to send the response back to you. If you want to see a representation of this, open a command prompt and type "tracert answers.yahoo.com"- it will show you Yahoo Answers's IP address, as well as the list of servers your message travels to get to Yahoo Answers and how long each of those steps took.

Normal people can't figure anything out from your IP address other than who your ISP is. There's no central database of the Internet or anything like that, and short of them physically tapping the line going from your ISP to your house, they can't see any of the messages you sent.

That first router, which is owned by your ISP, will of course see every message you send. It doesn't necessarily understand the message (which could be encrypted), but because of the way the Internet works, it has to know the destination server. There's no way to stop this- you could use a proxy, in which case the ISP would think that every message is going to the proxy, but then the proxy a) knows where every message is going and b) can read all the messages (normally, you're the only one who can read the encrypted messages).

There is one way to hide where you're going and that's through using Tor. Tor is a peer-to-peer proxy system, where your message will pass through other people's computers a variable number of times before going to its destination. The disadvantage of this system is that it's incredibly slow. Also, it makes your computer a carrier for other people's traffic, so the police may come knocking at your door if someone else does something illegal with it.