If you thought that no one knows what you are doing online, then you were definitely wrong. Nowadays almost anyone can track down your online surfing habits, find exactly which sites you've visited, and make a comprehensive profile about your likes, dislikes and searching preferences. The federal government, private businesses, web sites and search engines, they're all capable to observe your activity and store cookies on your computer for further tracking purposes. However, there are few things you can do to protect your online identity. Read on to find the easy ways of surfing anonymously:
Use VPNs
A Virtual Private Network (commonly referred as VPN) is basically a network which allows users to connect to each other or to remote sites through a secured tunnel created within a public network. It relies on "virtual" connections which are routed through the Web, from the company's private domain to the remote site or user, thus eliminating the need for physical connections. In other words, a VPN is a private network built over a public infrastructure, such as the Internet.VPNs can be successfully used for Anonymous Surfing, Bypassing geographical restrictions, hiding real IP addresses, Bypassing ISP Blocks, and for secure VOIP communication over Skype, Yahoo messenger, and other online chat clients.
Use Proxy Servers
Proxies have been used for years to bypass the network limitations and to surf anonymously, but they have one major disadvantage over VPNs: they are only able to filter the data which goes through a web browser, and hence your identity will still be exposed when using other sharing or communication programs. Anyhow, proxies are still great for navigating to certain web sites without revealing your identity or location.To find out which public proxy server is the best, you have to know its uptime and required access time first. To do this you can consult a free proxy servers list, such as the one from PublicProxyServers.com.
Make Use of Tor
Tor is one of the best free software applications which can be used for anonymous surfing. When using Tor, your entire communications will be encrypted and protected from curious looks, and that includes web surfing, instant messaging, data sharing and more.
Setting up Tor is pretty straightforward. First of all, you'll have to download the client from their site, plus an additional proxy program, such as Privoxy. All these software is self-configuring, and thus you won't have to dribble around with port settings, intervals and so on. Once you have installed Tor, it will appear as a small icon in the system tray. To start it, simply right click that icon and select "Start". Once you got it running, all you have to do is browse the Internet as usual. In case you're extra worried about your identity you may also change your Tor identity regularly, just to make it harder for websites or government to track you down. To do that, simply right click the Tor icon, and choose "New Identity". That's all you're required to do.There's only one disadvantage of Tor which is worthy to be mentioned: you'll notice a small connection lag at times. This simply comes and goes and there's not much you can do about it, aside from hoping that it will get fixed in a future Tor version.
Conclusions
Out of all the above-mentioned methods, VPNs come down as the best way to surf anonymously. They simply don't have any downsides, and they are able to encrypt all the data which passes through your computer.
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