[ WWW.TECHLIFE.NET ] [ 061 ]
[]fi ] HOW TO BECOME ANONYMOUS ONLINEyou can make it default by finding the startup
link for Chrome, right clicking and adding
‘–incognito’ to the startup script. In Edge
you can only start it manually.
04 Use startpage.com as your search
engine. Google and Microsoft record
every search. StartPage still gives you Google
results, but anonymises your IP address.
LEVEL 2: HIGH SECURIT Y
If you’re in a public location or don’t want your
ISP to know what you’re doing, you can take it
to the next level: VPNs and proxies.
01 A VPN service anonymises your IP
address to the sites and services you visit,
and makes it so that anybody monitoring your
internet connection can only see the link
between you and the VPN provider. They can’t
see where your data is ending up. Because the
link between you and the provider is encrypted,
even man-in-the-middle attacks like you might
encounter at a Wi-Fi hotspot are foiled.
If your data needs are modest — you only
need a VPN for particular activities — there
are various free VPN services you can use:
Betternet (www.betternet.co), CyberGhost
(www.cyberghostvpn.com), Hotspot Shield
(www.hotspotshield.com) and TunnelBear
(www.tunnelbear.com) are just a few.
02 If you just want to be able to access a
restricted website without your ISP or
admin knowing, you can just use a web proxy.
A Google search for ‘web proxy’ will bring
up dozens of such sites; our current
favourite is http://www.filterbypass.me.
You give a web proxy the address of the
site you want to visit. It will relay that site
to you in a browser frame, acting as an
anonymising proxy between you and
the site. The site can’t see your IP address
(though the web proxy can), and to
anybody watching, you appear to be
talking only to the web proxy site.LEVEL 3: PARANOID
So you want to be super-duper secure and
anonymous. Nobody is allowed to knowyour business. Then you should look to privacy
browsers and even Tor.01 Privacy browsers are web browsers
specially built for online anonymity.
They strip out all potential security risks, block
all cookies, run permanently incognito and
have inbuilt search proxies, ad blocking and
sometimes VPNs for IP anonymity. (If they
don’t have a VPN built-in, you can still use
a normal VPN).
Our current top pick is Epic Privacy
Browser, which has all of the above and more.
You can find it at http://www.epicbrowser.com.02 Even with a VPN, there is some security
risk — since your VPN provider
technically knows what you’re up to (though
most publicly state that they don’t keep logs).
If you want to go full paranoid, there’s no
stronger solution than Tor (torproject.org).
Tor is a browser and network that encrypts all
traffic and relays it through several other Tor
users, completely obscuring the original IP
address. The easy way to access Tor is through
the Tor Browser, a privacy browser that’s built
around Firefox and automatically uses Tor
routing in the background. You can grab it
from the Tor website.03 Use private messaging apps. The final
part of online anonymity is using
communications tools that aren’t controlled
or monitored by big businesses or government.
The most popular such tool is Signal
(whispersystems.org), available for mobiles
and now desktops. Signal lets you send secure
text messages and make voice calls that are fully
end-to-end encrypted and stored on no server
— the ultimate in privacy.TunnelBear is a VPN service with a free option.Privacy browsers like Epic are hardened
for maximum privacy.