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[] ] HOW TO BECOME ANONYMOUS ONLINE[ SUPERGUIDE ]How to become
anonymous online
MOST OF US WOULD PREFER NOT TO BE TRACKED ONLINE OR
OTHERWISE, SO HERE’S HOW TO STOP IT FROM HAPPENING.
[ NATHAN TAYLOR ]TRACKING OUR ONLINE activity has become
a major hobby of governments, ad agencies
and businesses. It’s not that difficult to shut
down the ways that you can be monitored
online. However, the more privacy protections
you add in, the less convenient the web
becomes for you.
So we split our guide protecting yourself
from online snoops into three levels. At level
one, you’ll barely notice any difference. At level
three you’re making significant sacrifices to
stay anonymous.LEVEL 1: BARELY NOTICEABLE
If you don’t want your web experience to be
meaningfully impacted, there are some simple
things you can do to stop tracking cookies and
network spies. These techniques won’t hide
your IP address from the sites you visit, or stop
your ISP from tracking your activity, but they
will stop ad tracking, social media tracking
and analytics.01 Disable third-party cookies. Third-party
cookies come from objects embedded in
the web page rather than from the provider ofthe web page itself. They’re how ad services
track you across sites — whenever you visit
a site with an embedded ad, that ad can use a
cookie to monitor what other sites you’ve visited
with embedded ads from the same ad provider.
To disable them in Chrome, go to ‘Settings
> Show advanced settings’, then click on
‘Content Settings’ under Privacy. In Edge,
go to ‘Settings View’ advanced settings and
change the Cookies setting to ‘Block only
third-party cookies’. In Firefox, you’ll find it
under ‘Options > Privacy’, where you can set
‘Accept third-party cookies’ to ‘Never’.02 Use browser add-ons Disconnect,
uBlock Origin and HTTPS Everywhere
which are available for all the major browsers.
Okay, there’s definitely some redundancy here,
since these add-ons do some of the same things.
But collectively they’re worth installing.
uBlock Origin is an ad blocker, and it also
blocks known dangerous domains — sites
that are known for malware or identity theft.
HTTPS Everywhere is an add-on that tries
to force an HTTPS connection to websites
instead of standard HTTP. HTTPS is
encrypted, so even if a network link is being
monitored, the content of the communication
is still protected.
Disconnect strips out tracking objects from
web pages you visit. Tracking cookies, social
media widgets, online analytics and more are
removed from web pages, preventing common
online tracking techniques.03 Use private browsing/incognito mode
often (or all the time). Whenever you
visit a site and don’t want your visit recorded in
your history or your cookies, you can use this
mode. Private browsing (in Firefox)/InPrivate
(in Edge)/Incognito (in Chrome) is a mode
that will delete all cookies and cached elements
when a session is ended and will not record
anything to your browser history. It will not, as
noted above, protect your IP address, however.
You can enable it in the menu for each
browser. In Firefox you can make it the default
mode in ‘Options > Security’. In Chrome,Chrome has third-party cookies enabled by default,
which you should turn off.Disconnect strips tracking information
out of web pages.Add ‘–incognito’ to the Target line of the Chrome
shortcut to start Chrome in private browsing mode.