If you use the Zero Trace Pen (or Tor in general) on your own WiFi, your ISP may be able to know that you are using Tor but not what you are doing exactly. If you do not want any possibility of your ISP to know that you are using tor, you can tell Tor to use bridges on the welcome screen (select “Yes” for the more options question and after pressing forward select the “My computer’s Internet connection is censored, filtered or proxied” option). That will hide the fact that you are using Tor from your ISP. This is not necessary, and it’s best to only use this method if you are living in an oppressive regime where your ISP is regulated by the government (China).
The only reason for using another WiFi than your own. is that an attacker would not get your real IP address in case of a de-anonymization attack but the one from the network you are using (e.g. the Starbucks WiFi). However, these attacks are unrealistic for buyers and the risks that this method brings along (e.g. someone shoulder-surfing or a camera recording your face and/or screen) make it not worth it for buyers.
If however, you are a vendor or a service provider, we recommend that you operate your business completely separate from where you sleep at night. Get an “office” where work only happens within those doors.
Is it okay to use WiFi with a login?
Sometimes you will have to log into WiFis with credentials that in some cases are also tied to your real identity (e.g. a college WiFi). The Zero Trace Pen spoofs all MAC addresses by default, which means that a system administrator would only see that another device other than your default one logged in with your credentials. That adds some plausible deniability because you can claim that someone stole your login credentials and logged in with them on another computer. Furthermore, nobody knows what exactly you are doing since the whole internet traffic that Zero Trace Pen produces is routed through the Tor network and is therefore encrypted and nobody knows where it goes. So to make it short: yes you can use the Zero Trace Pen on a WiFi network that requires you to log in.
Are DNS leaks an issue?
When using Tor your computer does not make the DNS requests for the sites you visit. The exit node (the last IP in the chain of relays that route your Tor traffic) makes the DNS requests for you. That is done because Tor does only support TCP but not UDP traffic. So just use the Zero Trace Pen, which routes all your traffic through the Tor network, and you will not have to worry about it.
