How did this nonsense make it to the front page of flyertalk? They can't access any of this.
They can see which sites you visit when you are on their wifi.
They can absolutely not access your google search history or your browser history. That's just idiotic.
Of course if they are installing spyware on your computer they may be able to see more, but that's true whether you are connected to their wifi or not.
Originally Posted by
megaloman
There is no way Hilton could access your browser's history when you connect to their WiFi, neither websites you visit. I believe it's just wording issue - they can see your browsing history while you've been conencted to their WiFi, nothing else.
They can't even see that. They can see the domains you have visited, not the paths, unless the sites are using plain http, rather than https, which almost no site does any more.
Suppose you visit
https://example.com/path/to/page. Your browser does a TLS handshake with
https://example.com to set up a secure connection (basically, a pair of keys that can be used to encrypt traffic back and forth, which a middleman (like an ISP) cannot decrypt). Then, once that is established, your browser sends a "GET /path/to/page" over that secure connection. So while someone in the middle (like the people who run the hotel wifi, or your ISP, or your mobile carrier if you are using your phone's mobile data) can see that you visited "example.com", they cannot see which pages on that site you accessed.
Of course, the domains that you visited could be valuable information (eg, for ad targeting) but it's not as much information as the full history.