Can my school see which sites I visit if I use VPN?

Sorojos

Basically, one guy is calling me clueless because I said that school will not be able to see my traffic if I use a VPN when connecting to their WiFi and he says that they will see it. Can someone help me debunk this guy? Because he is spreading misinformation and I don't know how to debunk it because I'm not technical or knowledable.

Graphite

Sorojos he says that they will see it.
"Can my school see which sites I visit if I use VPN"

If "it" refers to "which sites" (rather than see all traffic), then @doffactory had the correct answer. If your DNS requests are not properly routed through VPN, then the school can see which sites (domain) but not which page or what is being read or submitted in any forms. For example, they could see www.youtube.com, but not which video.

DNS should be tunneled by default for most VPN apps I believe. Verify that your VPN is tunneling DNS requests using the app settings and confirm using dnsleaktest.com.

If you need to explain to this guy, then first learn about DNS. I prefer the Phonebook analogy for beginners.

N1b

Sorojos not a technical advice, but your wording suggests you and the guy are having a heated discussion about this which would not help in education and learning. People who want to be right will defend their point or detract, even if they know they are wrong...

So if you don't just want to "win" the argument (there are no winners), but actually make a difference, you might want to invite him to learn about this with you and find answers together. In this case it doesn't matter who is correct, maybe you are even both correct and were referring to different setups. You'll laugh it off and dedicate more time to studying privacy and improve everybody's life. ;)

Kottonballs

https://protonvpn.com/blog/how-does-a-vpn-work/

doffactory

Try dnsleaktest.com with VPN on and off. If the results of each are different then most likely not.

intelligence

What does he think is the purpose of a VPN? Hint: The "P" is for "Private".

The network admins will see that there is data flowing between your device and some VPN server, but it will be encrypted and they won't know (a) the contents, or (b) the final destination.

billinmtl

Thanks for the tip about dnsleaktest.com 👍

treequell

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