Your Landlord’s WiFi Router Knows More About You Than You Think

If you work from home using a landlord-provided Wi-Fi network, you’ve probably assumed it’s private enough — password-protected, behind a locked door, nobody else is watching. But the device sitting in the hallway closet knows a lot more than most people realize. It logs every website you visit, every device you connect, and — as researchers demonstrated in 2026 — it can even track your physical movement through walls with 99.5% accuracy using signals it already broadcasts. That’s not a future problem. That’s the hardware in your home right now.

Privacy & Security
Home Office Setup
Data Protection

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What Your Landlord’s Router Sees (and Logs)

Every internet request you make — for work, for streaming, for banking — passes through that router. Even with HTTPS encryption, the router still sees the domain names you visit, the timestamps, and how long you stay. A 2026 analysis of router logging confirms that private browsing mode does nothing at the network level. Your browser might forget your history, but the router keeps a record.

Depending on the router model and configuration, it may also log connection and disconnection events for every device — your work laptop, your phone, your smart speaker, even your printer. Over weeks and months, that data creates a detailed pattern of when you’re home, when you’re awake, and which devices you use for what. That’s a problem if you’re a remote worker handling sensitive client files or confidential company data.

And it’s not just landlords. Your internet service provider sees the same data, and in the US, ISPs can sell your browsing history without explicit consent since the 2017 repeal of FCC broadband privacy rules. ISPs typically store this data for six months to two years, according to Incogni. They can also enhance it with demographic data from brokers — ethnicity, income, political affiliation — and then sell it to advertisers.

The New Frontier: Tracking You Through Walls

What most people don’t know is that the same Wi-Fi router can also sense your physical presence. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology demonstrated in 2025 that standard Wi-Fi signals can identify individuals through walls with up to 99.5% accuracy, using only beamforming feedback data that routers already exchange with connected devices.

Here’s how it works: modern routers (Wi-Fi 5 and later) use beamforming to focus signals toward specific devices. The connected devices send back beamforming feedback information — unencrypted data that describes signal quality. A person walking through the room changes those signal patterns. With a machine learning model trained on that data, researchers could identify which person was where, even through interior walls.

What makes this especially unsettling is that the hardware needed to perform this surveillance already exists in millions of routers. A tool like the open-source RuView project — which has roughly 78,000 GitHub stars — can run on a regular laptop and stream real-time location data using a $9 microcontroller. No cloud account, no special permissions, no way for you to know it’s happening.

Who’s Collecting Your Data

If you’re using an ISP-provided router — common in apartments and rentals — the data pipeline is even broader. Comcast Xfinity routers, for example, include Wi-Fi motion sensing that detects movement via signal disruption, as reported by Cybernews. That means your ISP could theoretically know whether anyone is home, and at what times, without ever installing a camera.

Then there’s the router manufacturer itself. TP-Link controls roughly 60% of the US home router market, and the US Commerce Department proposed banning its products in December 2024 over national security concerns. Microsoft discovered that thousands of compromised TP-Link routers had been used by Chinese state hackers since 2021. Even if you don’t own a TP-Link router, the point stands: router manufacturers have access to telemetry data, and some have been shown to share it with third parties.

Amazon’s Eero, a popular mesh system, collects device models, network performance logs, and usage patterns. Amazon says it won’t sell the data, but privacy advocates have noted the pattern — as one EPIC staff attorney put it, “wait a few years, like Facebook did with WhatsApp and Instagram.”

Third-party data harvesters like Plume partner with ISPs to collect even deeper analytics. Proton’s analysis notes that Plume promises ISPs marketing insights from detailed behavioral data, including when you’re present in your home.

What Actually Protects You (and What Doesn’t)

Let’s be direct about what works and what doesn’t, so you don’t waste time on half-measures.

If you’re renting and can’t replace the router, at least do the following: enable a VPN on your work devices, turn on DoH in your browser, and ask your landlord whether they have remote access to the router admin panel. If they do, ask them to disable remote management. If they won’t, consider using a personal mobile hotspot for work traffic.

For those who can buy their own router, look for models that support open-source firmware like OpenWrt or DD‑WRT. These give you granular control over telemetry and data logging. The Synology RT6600ax is one example that explicitly states no personal data collection from traffic and uses a local web interface rather than cloud storage.

The Honest Limit

Here’s the part that’s hard to hear: none of the above steps stop passive Wi‑Fi sensing. A neighbor, a passerby, or anyone with that $9 microcontroller and open-source software can still detect your presence through walls using the Wi‑Fi signals already bouncing around your home. WPA3 encryption doesn’t prevent that because the sensing doesn’t require access to your network — it just reads the ambient radio waves.

The IEEE 802.11bf standard will make this capability a default feature in new routers. Google Nest and Arris Surfboard models will have movement tracking built in, with no user opt-out. The technology is moving from research labs into commercial products, and there are currently no federal regulations in the US governing Wi‑Fi sensing deployment in residential settings.

That doesn’t mean you should give up on protecting your browsing data. It means you need to separate two problems: internet traffic privacy (which VPN and DoH genuinely fix) and physical location privacy (which currently has no consumer-friendly solution). For now, the best you can do is:

• Use a VPN and DoH together for all work traffic.
• Keep your router firmware updated and use the strongest available security settings.
• If you’re on a landlord’s network, consider a personal hotspot or a cellular backup for sensitive work.
• Stay informed about new standards and products — this area is changing fast.

If you’re a remote worker, your home network is your office network. Treating it with the same seriousness you’d give a company VPN is no longer optional. Our guide on securing your home network walks through the specifics of router settings and device segmentation.