But an easy metaphor for what Tor does is to think of your web traffic like a chain. There are many, many pages of information about Tor all over the web, so I’m not going to go too far into the minutiae. So here I’ll go about trying to get it right, which will include understanding how it’s easy to get it wrong.

See, I’ve recognized that I should know it and use it, but I’ve been a bad SOCmonkey and just never gotten around to it.

The fact is that there are legitimate uses, and knowing how to do it correctly can aid in the fight to stay protected while online. Now the ethics of all this - from the political and security concerns, to the criminal uses of anonymization - is really a separate discussion. Political dissent and organization, engaging in illicit trades, trying to make connections with other members of a vulnerable group, conducting research on a sensitive subject matter for a school project - these are a few among a wide variety of reasons someone may wish to keep their true identity hidden while online. So this is where we start thinking about anonymization - the practice of hiding your tracks. These things do an acceptable job of protecting my user accounts and minimizing impact for instances of website data compromise and account attack attempts.īut these things don’t hide the fact that I’ve actually visited or looked at any of those sites.

I create different complex passwords across the various websites I use - and store these passwords in an encrypted file on my laptop, which is also encrypted. For any account that allows it, I have Two Factor Authentication setup. I use HTTPS everywhere (ensures all website connections run over encrypted SSL if available), NoScript (disables all site Flash, Java, and JavaScript by default), uBlock Origin (ad blocking), and Privacy Badger (ad and cross-site activity tracker blocking), for everyday browsing. I do my best to protect my online presence. Why would anyone care about being anonymous online?

Is tor safe with windows