6 Tools which can help you to be anonymous

manhupella
6 min readFeb 4, 2023

--

Did you know that every time you go online, your web browser leaves a massive trail of information behind?

Your web browser reveals a ton of information about who you are, where you go, and what you like. Here are the details it leaks whenever you go online.

Anyone with access to your computer could review this information to learn a lot about your habits. What’s more, your browser happily reports more than you think to the websites you’re on.

You can prevent your information from being collected by using tools that can make you anonymous while online, by doing secure internet searches without any personal information being collected and shared with other websites.

Virtual machines: Virtual box

Virtual machines, shortened as VMs, operate in the same way as any other physical computer, such as a laptop, smartphone, or server. They have a CPU, RAM, disks for storing your files, and the ability to connect to the Internet if necessary. While your computer’s real components (referred to as “hardware”) are significant, virtual machines (VMs) are frequently considered as such virtual computers or software-defined computers within physical servers that exists primarily as code.

Virtual machines are computer files, commonly called “images”, that behave like a real computer. They can be run in a window as a separate computing environment, used many times to run a different operating system, or they can even function as the full user computing experience that is often found on many people’s work computers. Virtual machines are partitioned from the rest of the system, which means that the software inside them cannot interfere with the host computer’s main operating system.

When you are using a virtual machine to access the internet, the browser does not collect information about your actual computer, as shown here . This might prevent it from cyberattacks such as the propagation of viruses through malicious websites and the acquisition of personal data that would subsequently be used for malicious purposes.

Tor Browser

The Onion Router, or Tor, is a piece of free and open-source software that makes it possible to communicate anonymously. In order to hide a user’s location and use from anyone undertaking network surveillance or traffic analysis, it routes Internet traffic over a free, global volunteer overlay network made up of more than 7,000 relays. It is more challenging to track a user’s online behavior while they are using Tor. The purpose of Tor is to shield its users’ personal information, as well as their freedom and capacity to engage in private communication using Tor exit nodes utilizing anonymous IP addresses.

Proxy Servers

A proxy server is a server program used in computer networking that stands between a client asking for a resource and the server supplying it.

The client sends the request to the proxy server, which assesses it and executes the necessary network operations, rather than connecting directly to the server that can fulfill the request for a resource, such as a file or web page. This can reduce the complexity of the request, govern it, or offer other advantages like load balancing, privacy, or security. Distributed systems were given structure and encapsulation through the use of proxies.

Telegram

Telegram Messenger is a freemium, cross-platform, encrypted, cloud-based, and centralized instant messaging (IM) service that is available worldwide. The application also offers optional end-to-end encrypted conversations, sometimes known as secret chat and video calling, VoIP, file sharing, and a variety of other capabilities.

Telegram offers end-to-end encrypted chats as an option. Cloud chats and groups are encrypted between the client and the server, preventing ISPs and other network third parties from accessing data. Users may share an infinite amount of photographs, documents (2 GB per file), user locations, animated stickers, contacts, and audio files, as well as send text and voice conversations. Channels can also be followed by users.

Secret chats, allow messages to be sent using client-to-client encryption. These messages are encrypted using the MTProto protocol of the service. Although Telegram’s cloud-based communications, messages transmitted within a secret conversation can only be accessed on the device that launched the secret chat and the device that accepted the secret chat. Messages sent in private conversations can be removed at any moment and can optionally self-destruct.

Secret conversations must be begun and accepted by an invitation, after which the session’s encryption keys are shared. Users in a private conversation can confirm that no man-in-the-middle attack has happened by comparing images of their public key fingerprints.

Duckduckgo

A search engine that prioritizes user privacy and eliminates the “filter bubble” of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo also focuses on producing the best results, not the most, and leverages over 400 sources, including important crowdsourced sites like Wikipedia, as well as other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, and Yummly.

DuckDuckGo does not use a “filter bubble,” unlike other search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex, and others. (Using a “filter bubble” means that a search engine only reveals news and search results that it finds relevant and important for this user individually, instead of continually asking him about it. All other information will just be hidden. A search performed concurrently, on the same search server, from two distinct but close computers will return one and the same volume of results.) DuckDuckGo’s unwillingness to use the “filter bubble” allows any user to avoid this information tunnel and access all of the information available to the search engine.

DuckDuckGo uses HTTPS by default between the client and the server, with the AES encryption technique and a 128-bit key. DuckDuckGo also supports OpenSearch technology and can be easily added to the browser’s list of search engines, as well as the!Bang query syntax.
The search engine is developed in Perl and operates on the Nginx web server on FreeBSD, with a PostgreSQL database, Memcached, and Solr cache.

VPN

The term “virtual private network” refers to technologies that enable you to provide one or more network connections on top of someone else’s network. Despite the fact that communication is carried out across networks with a low or unknown level of trust (for example, public networks), the level of trust in the created logical network is independent of the level of confidence in the underlying networks owing to the use of cryptographic techniques (encryption, authentication, public key infrastructure, tools protection against repetitions and changes of messages transmitted over the logical network).

A VPN can provide three types of connections, depending on the protocols used and the destination: host-to-host, host-to-network, and network-to-network.
VPN technology has lately been utilized not just to build private networks, but also to provide Internet access by several “last mile” providers in the post-Soviet space.
A VPN network may provide a high level of encryption of transmitted information with the correct level of installation and the usage of specific software.
A VPN is made up of two components: a “internal” (managed) network, which may be several, and a “external” network via which the encapsulated connection travels (usually the Internet is used).
A single computer can also be linked to a virtual network.

--

--

manhupella

I'm a petroleum engineer, I love technology and my desire is to join these two worlds together.