Sky Broadband Buddy privacy issues

Hello!

Two points to this post: the first more of an exclamation of surprised horror, the second a request for info.

1) I am a young professional living in a shared house; a common part of modern life. I have just learned that Sky Broadband Boost comes with a parental control feature that sounds great for a traditional family household, but horrific for a shared household. Whoever it is in my house that pays the internet bill effectively gets access to everyone elses browsing histories. We have no way of stopping this or knowing whether or not it is happening. I am astonished that this is not considered a serious privacy issue. My house "mates" having access to my data is just as bad, if not worse, then my neighbour or someone else in my city. All Sky (or other service providers) would need is to create a 'shared household' account that explicitly excluded invasive parental controls.

2) How good of a defence against the above is a VPN? I'd have thought that would solve it, but something I read on a website made it sound like Broadband Buddy could shut down VPNs. Crikey! How much do people here know about Broadband buddy?

Parental controls are something with all the major ISPs that the account holder can play with.

The question is more around how much trust you have of the person with the login.

A VPN will hide what you are doing, but it is possible using the controls to block VPN access but not a great idea in a shared household.

The controls make seeing what others are doing easier, but a good many routers have these abilities built into them, just things like the buddy app make it easier.

If you can't trust your housemate(s) what's to stop you having a second line installed for your own use? Something that used to be quite common amongst sharers when connections were mainly slower ADSL2+ lines.

Looking at the help section of the Sky website. I cannot see any full-blown tracking via the Sky buddy app, just the ability to see which devices are online/connected rather than which service they are connecting to?

Your best bet for a quick and easy fix is to use a VPN if you feel it's worth it to you. There are pros and cons to VPN's I suggest you research. Personally, I don't use any OpenVPN based VPN's due to the overhead and clunkiness of the protocol compared to Wireguard. (I use Mullvad as I know Mozilla use them, but there are a few other good ones around!)

It seems the Sky app needs to be installed for fine-grain management and set up as a "kid device". As long as they aren't sneaking on to your device you should be ok

It's worth pointing out that in order for the tracking functions to work, the Broadband Buddy app has to actually be installed on the target device.

I think you might be confusing "Broadband Buddy" (phone monitoring software) with Broadband Shield (parental controls). Without Buddy installed, all the Broadband Shield settings will do is log any requests that come against the Parental Filter (ie it will log blocked requests)

With the right router or proxy server hey could do all this monitoring anyway. In the end if you don't trust the "owner" of a connection the use a VPN or get your own line. It doesn't need the ISP to provide anything special to do this if someone really wanted to - and even HTTPS won't necessarily protect you from this sort of "man in the middle" snooping.

Of course, have to remember that the ISP can see everywhere that is being surfed as well.

Is it with one of those systems which lists all attempts to access blocked sites? In which case since you're all adults I presume, it seems reasonable to ask to turn parental controls off altogether.

Edited by Oliver341 (Tue 29-Sep-20 13:52:55)

The person that has the broadband contract is legally liable for its (mis)use. It doesn't seem unreasonable for that person to have oversight of other users' activity should they feel that is necessary.
A VPN may help if you have something to hide. Or, perhaps you could tether to your mobile when doing anything online that you want to be secret?