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[quote=Anonymous][quote]I supposed if someone is a sophisticated hacker it’s possible, but no, normal people are not able to do this. [/quote]

True, if "a twelve-year-old with a laptop" counts as "sophisticated."

Seriously, it's not that hard.  The owner of the network can see the traffic that passes through that network.  Sometimes, others (e.g. the aforementioned twelve-year-old) can, too.

That said, most web traffic is end-to-end encrypted now.  There are some clever things that can be done to try to decrypt the traffic, but as long as the URLs in question start with https and your computer/device has not had private SSL certificates installed on it, the best that someone can do is see traffic between your computer and, say, Google, or the Washington Post, or ESPN, or whatever.  The contents of that traffic cannot (in practical terms) be determined.  Some older web sites use only http, which can be "sniffed" and the actual traffic decoded.

Most other new-ish protocols are also encrypted:  ssh, imaps, some SMTP sessions, etc.  But, if your mail client still supports, say, unencrypted IMAP or SMTP, email traffic can be sniffed.

I'm not sure how SMS works in a wi-fi context, but SMS has never been end-to-end encrypted, and service providers have always been able to capture and store the contents of SMS messages.[/quote]

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