Smart router privacy rarely comes up in discussions about personal data — but it probably should. Your home Wi-Fi router has a view of your internet activity that no app on your phone can match. It sits between every device in your house and the broader internet, processing every connection before it leaves your home.
For most of the router’s history, this visibility was largely theoretical. Consumer routers were dumb hardware that forwarded packets without logging or analyzing them. That changed when Amazon bought eero and Google launched Nest WiFi, turning home networking equipment into connected cloud products with their own data collection practices.
What a Router Can See
To understand what smart routers collect, it helps to understand their position in your network.
Every device in your home — phone, laptop, smart TV, thermostat, security camera, baby monitor — connects to your router. Every request that device makes to the internet passes through the router. The router performs DNS resolution (translating domain names to IP addresses), routes packets, and manages the local network.
This position gives the router access to a distinctive category of data:
Every domain queried from every device in your home. When your phone looks up instagram.com, when your TV checks for software updates, when your thermostat calls home to its manufacturer’s servers — all of these DNS queries pass through the router. This is a complete log of every service every device in your home contacts, associated with each device’s local identifier.
Device inventory. The router maintains a record of every device on your network, including the manufacturer, model in many cases, and a hardware identifier (MAC address). This is the fingerprint of your home’s entire device ecosystem.
Traffic volumes per device. How much data each device transfers, when, and to which general destinations.
Internal network structure. Which devices communicate with each other, device names you’ve set, and in mesh systems, the physical location of devices within your home based on signal strength from different access points.
What Amazon Eero Collects
Amazon acquired eero in 2019, and eero’s privacy policy reflects what you’d expect from an Amazon product: data collection oriented toward the ecosystem.
According to eero’s published privacy policy, the system collects:
- The model, serial number, and technical details of each device connected to your network
- The volume of data sent and received by each device
- The websites you visit, services you use, and content you engage with (described as domain names and service identifiers, not content)
- Physical locations of devices within your home, inferred from Wi-Fi signal strength measurements across mesh nodes
Eero states it does not collect the actual content of your web traffic — the payload of encrypted connections is not readable by the router. But domain names, device identities, and traffic patterns are collected and transmitted to Amazon’s servers.
Amazon’s stated purpose includes network performance optimization, troubleshooting, and product improvement. The same data that helps eero optimize your Wi-Fi signal also tells Amazon which streaming services your household uses, what smart home devices you own, and how your household’s internet usage patterns change across the day.
The Amazon Ecosystem Angle
Amazon already has data about your purchases, your Alexa queries, your Ring doorbell activity, and your Prime Video viewing. Eero’s network-level data complements and extends this profile with information about devices Amazon doesn’t make and services Amazon doesn’t operate.
A household that uses eero as its router, Ring for doorbell cameras, Echo for voice control, and Fire TV for streaming is giving Amazon a particularly complete picture — from the physical presence in the home to the network activity of every connected device.
What Google Nest WiFi Collects
Google’s approach to Nest WiFi privacy is similar in structure, with a few differences in specific practices.
Google’s Nest WiFi privacy documentation describes collection of:
- Router hardware information and setup details
- Wi-Fi network performance data
- Connected device information
- Traffic usage statistics
Google states that Nest WiFi does not log your DNS queries by default. This is a meaningful difference from what some other smart routers do — Google’s position is that browsing destinations aren’t captured at the router level.
However, this applies to Nest WiFi’s own data collection. When you use Google as your DNS resolver (which is common, as 8.8.8.8 is a popular option), Google’s DNS service does log queries — just through its DNS product rather than through the router directly.
Nest WiFi provides a privacy settings option in the Google Home app, where users can access and delete network activity data and limit some collection. This control exists and works; finding it requires knowing to look.
The DNS Position
The most consequential thing a router can collect is DNS queries. DNS — the Domain Name System — is the directory service that translates human-readable addresses like storage.google.com into the IP addresses devices actually connect to.
By default, DNS queries from your devices pass through your router and are resolved by whatever DNS server your ISP assigns or your router is configured to use. A router that logs DNS queries has a timestamped record of every domain every device in your home looked up — across your phone, your spouse’s laptop, your children’s tablets, your smart appliances, and every other connected device.
This isn’t the content of what you’re doing online. It’s the list of every service you contact, when you contact it, from which device. A DNS query log is a detailed behavioral map of a household without requiring any decryption.
Eero’s DNS Feature
Eero offers a paid add-on called eero Secure that includes DNS-based content filtering, ad blocking, and threat protection. This feature explicitly performs DNS inspection to implement filtering.
When eero Secure is active, eero is performing DNS resolution for your network rather than passing queries to an external resolver. The feature works because eero can see the domain queries. The privacy trade-off is explicit: content filtering requires seeing what’s being requested.
Even without eero Secure, basic eero operation involves enough DNS visibility for the network telemetry described in its privacy policy.
What You Can Do
Switch Your Router’s DNS to an Encrypted Resolver
Regardless of which router you use, configuring DNS over HTTPS (DoH) or DNS over TLS (DoT) on your router prevents your ISP and reduces your router manufacturer’s visibility into DNS queries. Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1, NextDNS, and Control D all support encrypted DNS with options for logging control.
The catch: this doesn’t eliminate the router’s ability to observe DNS queries before they’re forwarded — it encrypts the upstream path. On some routers, enabling encrypted DNS forwarding effectively means the router still sees the query but the upstream provider sees an encrypted version.
Opt Out of Product Improvement Programs
Both eero and Nest WiFi have options to disable sharing data for product improvement purposes. These are not the same as disabling data collection entirely — some data collection is necessary for basic network operation. But disabling optional improvement-sharing reduces what’s transmitted to manufacturer servers beyond what’s operationally needed.
For eero: Settings → Labs → Data and Privacy (exact path may vary by firmware version). For Google Nest WiFi: Google Home app → Wi-Fi → Settings → Privacy.
Consider a Privacy-First Alternative Router
Several router manufacturers offer hardware without cloud accounts and without data collection beyond what’s needed for local operation. Firewalla (a dedicated network security device) and certain Asus router models running custom firmware like DD-WRT or OpenWrt can provide the same mesh coverage and parental controls without manufacturer data collection.
The trade-off is setup complexity and loss of manufacturer app features. For users who want router-level control without giving a major platform visibility into their household network, this trade-off is often worth it.
Use a VPN at the Router Level
A VPN configured on the router itself routes all household traffic through an encrypted tunnel before it reaches the router manufacturer’s DNS infrastructure. This reduces what the router can observe in terms of destinations and prevents the router’s DNS from resolving your queries.
The limitation: VPN at the router level introduces latency, may slow connections for all devices, and requires a router that supports VPN client configuration — not all consumer routers do.
What This Means for Cloud Files
When you use a cloud storage service over your home network, every connection from your device to that service passes through your router. The content of encrypted file uploads isn’t readable. But the router can see that your device connected to Google Drive, Dropbox, or any storage service you use — when, from which device, and roughly how much data moved.
If you use a router with cloud data collection, the operator of that router has a behavioral log of your cloud storage usage patterns. Not what’s in the files — but which services you use, how often, and how much you transfer. Combined with device inventory (which devices in your house are making those uploads), this is a more detailed picture than most people realize they’re providing through their home network.
The Bigger Picture
Smart routers are useful. Mesh systems like eero and Nest WiFi genuinely improve home Wi-Fi coverage in ways that older single-router setups couldn’t. The data collection exists alongside real utility.
The question worth sitting with is whether the convenient default — a major platform’s cloud-connected router at the center of your household network — reflects the privacy arrangement you’d choose if you set it up from scratch today.
Most people inherited the arrangement from an ISP installation or a retailer recommendation. The data collection terms were in a privacy policy they agreed to during setup. The controls to limit collection exist but require knowing where to look.
That’s not a scandal; it’s just how connected hardware tends to work. But for a device that sits between every personal file backup, every family member’s browsing activity, and every smart home device in your house, it’s worth understanding what you’ve opted into.