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May 17, 2023

Is Your College or School Wi

Can schools and colleges see what you search for via their public Wi-Fi? Is it

Can schools and colleges see what you search for via their public Wi-Fi? Is it safe to use your school's internet? Here's what you need to know.

Smartphones are an essential part of school life—used to receive homework assignments, communicate with teaching staff, organize friend groups, and of course, supply material for school meme accounts and TikToks. Many schools provide free Wi-Fi for students, but is it safe, and do they monitor what you're up to online?

So why might educational institutions even offer free Wi-Fi to students? Education, like everything else in the 21st century, is changing. It's a long time since students were forced to sit silently at rows of wooden desks, assiduously copying down dictation, or notes scrawled on a blackboard in a cloud of chalk dust. Old didactic tactics give way to new ones, and educators have long since concluded that learning can be more efficient and fun if they integrate technology into the classroom.

Homework can be assigned and turned in using Google Classroom, and teachers can easily check for plagiarism in essays turned in electronically—this is much harder with an ink-stained exercise book.

Laptops in a college classroom require Wi-Fi to link to cloud accounts, and schools and colleges generally make this available for students' personal devices, too.

When you connect to the internet from home, information such as the sites and pages you visit goes from your computer or phone, through the router, to your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Then, it goes to the ISP of the site you're visiting, and from there to the servers of the site itself. The site address is queried using a DNS service—usually set by your ISP.

Your web traffic is vulnerable to snooping at every step along the way, but there is an expectation of trust from all the parties involved. You trust that your family isn't monitoring traffic through the router; you trust that your DNS service isn't logging requests; and you trust that the various ISPs aren't making money from selling your browsing history. That trust may or may not be misplaced.

By connecting to your school's Wi-Fi, you add an extra potential snooper into the picture, and unlike the various corporate entities who only have commercial interest in your data, your school or college may monitor what you get up to online in order to keep disruption to a minimum, discourage bullying, and make sure that you aren't watching back to back TikToks when you should be studying biology.

Because your traffic is going through the school's network, the IT team can see what sites you're visiting, and when you visit them. Are you on Snapchat when you should be in science class? School staff can find out and link traffic back to your device.

If you're visiting websites that don't use HTTPS, school staff can even see which parts of a website or service you view. If the website has HTTPS enabled, they will only be able to see the domain name.

You should assume that your school or college monitors everything you do online.

In addition to monitoring where you go online, schools can also block access to certain sites (including apps), or even worse, they can restrict access to any domains that aren't whitelisted.

We can't say for certain whether it's safe to use the Wi-Fi in your individual college or school. It may be completely unmonitored, or the system may flag up alerts if you attempt to visit a site you shouldn't or use a banned app. Your best course of action is to consult your school's IT and acceptable use policies. Most schools have extensive documentation on what you are allowed to do and what is banned. And if you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. Right?

Educational institutions should at least keep their Wi-Fi networks secure. Nonetheless, there are always risks to using public Wi-Fi.

The only real way to ensure that you can connect to the internet in school without being surveilled by staff is to avoid the school Wi-Fi altogether. Use your phone's data instead. Mobile data isn't as expensive as it used to be, and even unlimited data plans can be seen as a bargain if you really need to access the internet in school and don't want anyone to know what you're doing. We do, however, advise against this: there are reasons certain sites are blocked, whether they be for security, safeguarding, or productivity.

The internet is one of the greatest resources at our fingertips. Use that access to improve your study habits, use better software for learning, and take your grades up a notch.

David is a freelance writer with a background in print journalism, and a love of Free and Open Source Software. He has been using Linux since the early 2000s, and is a regular contributor to Linux Format magazine in the UK. He runs a range of sites and services from a Raspberry Pi perched precariously atop his living room couch, and never passes up a chance to take a stray edX course to better his understanding of technology, humanity, and other, related matters.David is a terrible guitar player, and he spends his free time touring the British Isles, off-grid, with his caravan and dogs. Occasionally, he writes books. No-one likes them. See what he's up to at davidrutland.com