Hi there, I’m looking to get into self-hosting for privacy reasons and I wanted to ask y’all: how inadvisable is it to utilize an ISP-owned router/modem? I feel like they’re able to track everything I do online with their more than likely integrated spyware.
Recently, a major ISP in the Netherlands was determined to be streaming metadata from within their customer’s networks to Lifemote, a Turkish AI company.
Here’s a report in Dutch: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/245620/odido-router-stuurde-analyticsdata-naar-turks-ai-bedrijf.html
This is just the latest one to get caught doing it, but determine how comfortable you are having your internal network exposed to a 3rd party.
I’ve used personal/non-ISP modems and routers for 25 years because I’m not comfortable with it it. At all… But hey, you do you.
While I would say sending MAC Addresses and Wi-Fi names is very far from tracking everything you do on the internet, this highlight another very important point: The routers that provided by ISPs are usually very cheap and crappy, and this in itself security implications.
Like this example of pulling a script from an unverified HTTP source and executing it as root 🤯… Not to mention that firewalling and port forward configuration options may be pretty simplified and limited.