How to maintain anonymity online: 5 tools that really work
Ways to conceal your online activity (photo: illustrative photo: Freepik)
In the era of digital technologies, maintaining privacy is becoming increasingly difficult. Every action you take online can leave a trace — from your IP address to your search history. However, there are proven ways to protect your anonymity, according to the technology site PCWorld.
IP address of the data sender
The biggest betrayers are your browser and IP address. The latter is automatically provided during internet browsing so that the website knows where to send the data. This is necessary, but anyone can use your IP address to determine your approximate location.
Analyzing your IP address is just one of several identifiers that can be used to track you online. However, your IP address is the most important general characteristic that site operators and advertisers can access.
Therefore, protecting your IP address requires special attention when it comes to enhancing your privacy. In this case, a virtual machine can be very helpful.
VM for anonymous surfing
A virtual machine (VM) helps you simply surf the web using an invisibility cloak whenever you want to be as untraceable as possible – for example, during online shopping, searching for information, or accessing private content.
For everyday visits to pages such as news websites, music, and movie streaming, a protective shield is usually not required. You can perform these actions without a virtual machine on your computer.
Hide virtual machine traffic with a VPN
A tried and tested way to surf the internet relatively unnoticed is through a VPN tunnel (Virtual Private Network). In this case, data packets are not sent directly from your virtual machine to the target server but are routed through a VPN server.
The advantage is that the server logs of the sites you visit do not store your IP address but rather the IP address of the VPN server. Additionally, data sent through the VPN tunnel is encrypted, making it harder for third parties to intercept it.
To connect to the internet with a hidden connection, all you need to do is install the software provided by the VPN provider on the virtual machine (such as NordVPN, Cyberghost, and Surfshark). Windscribe is free with a 10GB monthly limit.
VPN providers typically not only mask your IP address but also help you bypass geo-IP blocks. These measures are designed to prevent users from specific countries from accessing services, typically video streaming, that are either unavailable or restricted in those countries.
However, if you connect to the internet using your IP address, which identifies you as a user from Germany, through a VPN server with a Ukrainian IP address, the target server will see you as being from Ukraine.
More privacy while surfing
When your PC's IP address is changed and masked, you’re not just fooling the advertising industry. Instead of appearing as one visitor who visits ten pages, the server logs will show you as ten separate visitors, each visiting one page. To achieve this, it’s recommended to use the Tor browser, which connects to the Tor network. It masks your real IP address through intermediate proxy servers.
Data in the Tor network no longer travels directly from you to the site; instead, it passes through several intermediate points. The first point knows your IP address, but the subsequent ones do not, and neither does the site you're visiting. Each of these points only knows where the data came from but not its final destination. This makes it extremely difficult to track who exactly sent the request.
However, Tor has its drawbacks. Depending on the load, your browsing speed may significantly slow down. Even an overloaded intermediate node can cause delays. And like any network, it remains secure only as long as it hasn’t been compromised. Ultimately, if intelligence agencies can eavesdrop on a Tor node, it doesn’t mean the user can be easily de-anonymized.
Security and anonymity with Tails
Tails is a live Linux system based on Debian, with a strong emphasis on privacy and anonymity. For this purpose, Tails includes the previously mentioned, highly secure Tor browser. Additionally, it features other programs such as the Thunderbird email client, the Pidgin messenger, and graphic programs like Gimp and Inkscape, as well as the LibreOffice suite.
Three versions of Tails are available for download from the official website https://tails.net/. You can choose between a USB image for use on USB drives, an ISO image for burning to DVD, and an ISO image for use in a virtual machine like VirtualBox or VMware Workstation/Player.
You might be interested in the 11 best privacy apps.
