How to stop your ISP tracking your browser history: 2025 Guide

Are you concerned about your Internet Service Provider (ISP) tracking your every online move? Worried about the potential misuse of your browsing history, personal information, and even geographical location? It’s time to regain control over your privacy. Thankfully, there is a simple solution in the form of a VPN.

With a Virtual Private Network (VPN) you can bid farewell to the prying eyes of ISPs that continuously track your online activities. By encrypting your internet traffic and routing it through an intermediary server, a VPN ensures that your browsing data becomes unreadable to your ISP, network administrators, government agencies, or malicious hackers. It also allows you to camouflage your IP address with one from a location of your choice. This lets you bypass geographic restrictions when streaming your favorite video content, accessing gaming platforms, or engaging in online activities while traveling abroad.

In this post, I reveal the best VPN to prevent activity tracking and explain how to set it up. I will guide you through the setup process and explore the reasons behind ISPs and other entities tracking your online behavior. Take charge of your privacy and join me as we reveal the secrets to outsmarting these prying eyes.

What can your ISP see?

Unless you use a VPNB to protect yourself, your ISP can track everything you do online, and log that data too. This includes but is not limited to:

• Which sites you visit, when, and how often
• Your search history
• What files you download or upload
• Emails sent and received
• Dates and times of internet access and activities
• Social media usage
• Passwords and unencrypted data given to websites

There are a variety of reasons why ISPs track and store this information – only one of which is to improve your user experience. You can read more about these reasons later on in this article, but first, let’s learn how to prevent it!

How to use a VPN to prevent ISP monitoring

While a VPN might sound a bit complicated, getting started with one is actually very straightforward.

Here’s how to stop your ISP from monitoring which websites you visit:

1. Select a VPN provider that offers a service that fits your needs. We recommend NordVPN, but Surfshark, IPVanish, and ExpressVPN are excellent alternatives.
2. Submit your payment and make a note of your new username and password.
3. Find the appropriate download for your device on the VPN provider’s website and run the installation. Most have desktop clients for Windows and MacOS and mobile apps for Android and iOS.
4. Launch the desktop client or mobile app, log in, and connect to a VPN server. The server location you choose will depend on your specific needs. For example, for fast browsing, you may want to connect to a geographically close server. To access your US Netflix library abroad, you’d need a US server.
5. You can now surf the web as you would normally, but your ISP won’t be able to monitor your traffic.

Note that many providers include startup options within their app settings. For example, you may be able to connect to the VPN every time you start your device. This way, you can ensure your ISP never has any data to log.

The best VPN for stopping ISP tracking

NordVPN

Jan 2025

NordVPN is the best VPN in the industry for a host of reasons. It boasts a large network of more than 7,100 servers spanning 118 countries, so you won’t have issues finding a server in the appropriate location.

We regularly speed-test the VPNs we recommend in order to ensure they’re up to the tasks you need them for. We tested NordVPN three times in one day to check its speeds and consistency. You can see the results of those tests here:

NordVPN averaged 177.6 Mbps across all three speed tests. In practice, this means that you won’t experience noticeable slowdowns when browsing, streaming HD video, or downloading. This was also more than 53 Mbps faster than the combined average speed of the other providers.

As you can see here, NordVPN was just faster than the second place provider Surfshark and noticeably faster than IPVanish in third place.

This service offers best-in-class security, including 256-bit encryption and perfect forward secrecy. It comes with DNS leak protection and a kill switch to ensure your traffic never leaves the encrypted tunnel and remains unreadable to your ISP. NordVPN has a strict no-logging policy, so it won’t log any personally identifiable information.

You can see how NordVPN compared against the other market-leading providers in terms of security and privacy in the chart below.

NordVPN (along with Surfshark) scored an impressive 9.5 out of 10 (we’ll talk about how these scores were calculated in the next section), making it particularly suitable for protecting your online activities from interested third parties.

NordVPN allows up to 10 simultaneous connections under each account. Apps are available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. It can even be configured to home routers so that every internet-connected device in your home is secured. There is also a 30-day money-back guarantee, which means you can get a refund if the service isn’t for you.

Want to know more? Read our in-depth review of NordVPN.

How we found the best VPN to stop ISP tracking: our methodology

Although there are plenty of other VPN services out there, relatively few are suitable for stopping ISP tracking while also providing a good day-to-day experience. We recommended NordVPN because it scored highly in the following areas when compared with a selection of the most popular VPN providers:

• Speed: We carried out several speed tests while connected to each provider’s US servers. Note that tests were carried out on a rate-limited virtual machine. We used 250 Mbps as our base connection speed as this is the median average of fixed broadband speeds in the US.
• Security and privacy: We evaluated providers against 16 different security and privacy metrics. These scores were combined to give an overall score out of 10 for comparison.
• Value for money: To find the best, rather than cheapest provider, we evaluated providers on eight different metrics relating to “value”, such as the number of permitted connections and the existence of any discounts or trial periods.
• Ease of use: We scored providers on 10 different metrics relating to how easy they were to use. We looked at everything from the quality of the providers’ apps through to their signup and cancellation processes.
• Streaming: We tested VPNs with a wide range of streaming services (including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+) to find out how well they worked.

Want to know more about how we test VPNs and the results of those tests? Check out our detailed methodology article.

Using a free VPN to stop ISP tracking

We know free VPNs are tempting, but you may just be trading in one evil for another. There are various reasons why this is the case, from both a security and practical standpoint.

Free VPN services are well-known for tracking user activity, which is exactly what you’re looking to avoid. They’ll use tracked data to build user profiles and sell them to the highest bidder. Even if they don’t partake in this practice, chances are you’ll have to endure ads injected into the sites you visit by the VPN itself. This is far from the worst of it. Some free VPNs don’t encrypt your traffic at all, while others carry malware. One free provider was even caught hijacking users’ idle bandwidth and using it to form a botnet.

As if poor security isn’t bad enough, things don’t get much better on the performance side. Free VPNs typically have a large number of users vying for space on a limited number of servers. This translates to queues to connect to servers and unreliable internet connections. You’ll likely endure slow page loading while browsing and buffering during streaming.

All in all, it just makes sense to opt for a reputable paid provider that provides you with secure and reliable service. If you’re concerned about the cost, make the most of reputable VPNs with a money-back guarantee or choose one with a free trial.

Other ways to prevent ISP tracking

If you’re not convinced a VPN is right for you, there are other methods that will work to varying degrees. For example, using the Tor browser will encrypt your traffic and prevent your ISP from seeing which sites you’re visiting. However, this only works for browser traffic whereas a VPN encrypts all traffic going to and from your device. Bear in mind that your ISP will be able to see that you’re using Tor, which can raise some red flags. It’s also worth noting Tor will significantly slow down your connection speed.

See also: Best VPNs for Tor

HTTPS proxies are another option for encrypting browser traffic, but again, these don’t work for other traffic flowing to and from your device. Plus, with HTTPS proxies, your ISP can see which websites you’re visiting, although not specific pages or content.

Other proxies, for example, DNS and SOCKS, don’t encrypt your traffic, so they may be fine for some purposes, such as unblocking content. But they will generally leave your internet activity exposed to monitoring by your ISP.

Why ISPs track your activity

For many users, it seems normal that their internet service providers should be able to see everything they’re doing online. You might even suppose they need information about your internet traffic to provide you with the service in the first place. But this isn’t the case.

So why does your ISP want to see your search history? Well, there are a few potential reasons. No matter where you’re located, one or more of these will almost certainly be in play:

Data retention laws

In some countries, mandatory data retention laws stipulate that ISPs must track and record specific data about their users. This can include which websites you visit, emails, messages, searches, location, and operating system, among other things. The information could be used for various reasons, but governments will often claim that it’s for use by law enforcement for specific reasons, such as an anti-terror initiative.

Advertising

In today’s world, data equates to dollars, often in the form of targeted advertising. If a company knows your browsing habits, they can figure out just about anything about your life, from where you bank, shop, and eat to more personal information like your marital status, health issues, and even sexual preferences. ISPs make deals with advertisers and collect information on their behalf. Companies can then target you with relevant ads on the web pages you visit.

You’ll often hear advertisers stating that serving more relevant ads improves the user experience, although, from a user standpoint, this isn’t always the case. In fact, it can feel like a violation of privacy and even downright creepy when ads related to your browsing history pop up.

This is even more concerning when it’s not you but your child who is being targeted. In fact, given that children influence the majority of household purchasing decisions, their information is especially valuable to marketers. Using a VPN, you can prevent profiles from being built around you and your child.

Censorship

While residents of many countries can enjoy unrestricted access to the free web, there are many countries where citizens can’t. Governments restrict access to certain web pages for various reasons. For example, if a website incites hatred, speaks ill of a country’s government, or encourages activities that are against a particular religion (such as porn or gambling sites), it could be blocked in certain countries or regions.

Governments often use ISPs to enforce this censorship. Since ISPs can see what websites you’re visiting and grant you access to those sites, they have the control to block access as mandated by the government.

Bandwidth throttling

While it is less common to see nowadays, bandwidth throttling by ISPs has been reported in the past. For example, Comcast admitted to throttling speeds for heavy internet users, although it says this practice has been suspended.

When you use a VPN, your ISP can’t see what you’re doing online, so you won’t be subjected to selective throttling on sites like Netflix, YouTube, and Skype.

Logging policies explained

If you’ve done any research into VPNs, you may have come across some information about VPN logging policies. There are generally two types of logs that a provider might keep. The first is traffic logs, which contain information about things like the sites you visit and the files you download. The second type is connection logs, which contain information pertaining to your VPN session.

Ideally, you don’t want your VPN provider to keep any traffic logs whatsoever. If they do, then you’re not much better off than you would be with an ISP keeping an eye on you instead. The providers that keep these types of logs (often those offering free services) will typically be looking to profit from the information they record, such as by selling it to third-party advertisers.

Connection logs are not really a concern, as long as the provider doesn’t record things like your real IP address or the VPN IP address. If they do, it’s fairly easy for someone with that information to trace activity back to you. In that case, you’re back to a similar invasion of privacy you would have with your ISP.

To help you decide who to trust, we’ve studied the privacy policies of more than a hundred VPN providers to find out which logs they keep, if any.

How to stop your ISP tracking your browser history: FAQs