How to Stay Anonymous on the Web
There may be multiple reasons why you might want to hide your identity on the Internet. You may want to prevent data miners from collecting your personal information, your interests and preferences. You may want to test the customer support of your newly created service, which requires contacting it from several different IP addresses. Or you may be paranoid and believe that everybody is out there to get you – the reason doesn’t really matter.
What matters is approaching this task in a clever fashion. Here are ways of staying anonymous you may use, with their pros and cons.
1. Anonymizers
Anonymizers are probably the simplest and most widespread method of hiding your online identity, and they may be really helpful in some situations. Some of them are free, others are available at a small subscription fee, and their capabilities differ in the same fashion – some offer more possibilities, others, simpler ones, like Anonymouse, offer the bare bones functionality which, however, may come in handy for less complicated situations – for example, if you want to visit a site that for some reasons blocks connections from your region of the world. However, they won’t help you with anything more complex: chatting with customer support, downloading files, sending and receiving e-mails and suchlike is out of the question.
2. Proxy Servers
Proxy servers reroute the signals received from your computer through a server that has nothing to do with you, changing your IP and generally making you look as if you were coming from a different country. This approached used to be extremely popular to evade restrictions on particular regions that prevented Internet users located there from visiting particular sites, but right now it is losing in popularity due to being rather convoluted and unstable – proxy servers appear, change and disappear pretty quickly and the one you used yesterday may be out of order tomorrow. In other words, using this approach requires a lot of attention and micromanagement, and not everybody is ready to penetrate all the intricacies of proxy usage.
3. VPN (Virtual Private Network) Service
An optimal variant for those who want a safe, stable, universal and easy-to-use anonymization system and don’t shy away from spending a little money on it – because all VPN service providers worth using are commercial ones, available at a subscription fee or after you buy some kind of software. Unlike anonymizers, they don’t simply let you connect websites making it look as if your IP were different, they syphon all your traffic through themselves, which allows you to download and send files, receive and send e-mails, participate in chats and conferences, choose your proxy servers and much more – actual functions may differ from VPN to VPN.
4. TOR Network
TOR network is aimed at making your stay in the Internet completely anonymous – with the accent on ‘aimed’, because right now it is still far from being perfectly safe. It works by bouncing all signals coming from your computer between several other servers, effectively concealing your IP. However, it comes at a price: TOR is excruciatingly slow and again, won’t do much good aside from surfing the Internet.
Finally, one thing you should understand before using any of these methods: none of them provides you with complete protection from tracking, they simply mean that determining your IP and your identity is going to be somewhat harder. The worst thing you may do is succumb to the feeling of false invulnerability and try to do something illegal, believing that anonymization is going to protect you from retribution – it isn’t so. If it is really necessary to track someone’s activity through the Internet, it can always be done. Anonymization just ensures that in most cases nobody would care enough to do it.
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