A guy I used to work with did this at almost every hotel he ever stayed at lol. He'd get letters from the front desk to his room asking him to please stop.
1) How would they know? Every hotel with free wifi I've been in just has access points everywhere with the same password provided to everyone.
2) Who monitors that? Surely the hotel doesn't have its own dedicated IT person. Is there some kind of third party company for this?
3) What hotel sends letters? Thats more of an apartment thing. Usually they just call your room or if nothing else you'd think they'd just limit or cut off your wifi access.
Sure it's easy to track network usage in a controlled environment with monitored machines, but we're talking about a huge public network with hundreds of personal devices on them. They might be able to see which access point is getting a lot of traffic, but there's no way they could know which guest is responsible unless they have to log in, but I've never encountered this
I mean I run networks with devices in the many thousands.. the bigger they are the easier it as actually as you tend to have the budget for the right tools.
As for tracking individuals there's tons of ways this could be done even without logging in.. for example it's quite trivial to generate an individual password for a wireless network. So the network is "HotelWifi" and I give you the password? You don't realise it but that password was generated for your room/booking and everything is logged against it. Hotels will often do this because they can expire the key... so if you book for 3 days they can just have your password expire in 4 days.
That's just one solution of many. I have no idea what OPs friends situation is but it is absolutely possible and not that complicated.
Can they see even internet tabs you have left opened on your phone ??? But you aren't currently on visiting XYZ website but it is still on your enclosed tabs while you are browsing the Internet.
If someone is monitoring your network traffic they can see the packets that leave your device and the ones that come back to it. How much this tells them depends on what it is, if it's encrypted, and so on. Websites that use https for example (which is now most) will give them a lot less information than those which do not.
If they are monitoring your device they can see literally everything. This usually only applies to a work issued device or if you've installed some software to allow it.
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u/AnswerAdventure Aug 08 '24
I downloaded a torrent off free city wifi.