How to surf the Internet and other “camouflage techniques” anonymously

In a context in which government surveillance is an issue that is on the agenda and in which we do not cease to provide numerous data to the network, our privacy has become one of the great unresolved issues. An issue that has gained special interest for many Internet users who, however, do not know how to surf anonymously.

Thus, today we are collecting some of the ways to mask our fingerprint, camouflage our IP and other techniques that will help us, at least, to go unnoticed and complicate the fact that potential interested parties can easily track us online. These are some of the tools we can use.

USE A Proxy TO CHANGE YOUR IP

We will start with proxies, which began to sound louder after Netflix started blocking some of them in order to prevent its users from bypassing geographical limitations; networks that have become popular in recent years. The same thing happened with the pirate bay too, however people are buying proxies from good provides like https://proxies.sx/

And it is not surprising, since, basically and as its name indicates (Virtual Private Work), a VPN is a virtual private network that connects several devices as if they were physically located in the same place. Connection data is always encrypted, from the moment they enter the VPN until they leave it. In any case, we have already detailed some technicalities in more detail in this article.

Some of its most significant advantages are that they give us the opportunity to access any website regardless of our location and that, beyond hiding our IP, allow us to establish a secure connection between the computer and the server. So much so that they are usually used in countries where there is censorship of certain content.

TOR, YOUR ALLIATE

Originally developed as a project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to protect the exchange of information in government communications, TOR (The Onion Router) is a layered routing system – hence the onion reference – that allows us to connect to the network using intermediate nodes offered by other users.

What it does is “dizzy” the trajectory between the remote server and our computer, making our communications bounce off of a gigantic network maintained by the aforementioned volunteers, dispersed all over the world. A procedure that, in spite of slowing down the speed, makes it possible to keep the data safe. One of the easiest ways to use it is through the Tor Browser.

I2P

A very interesting alternative to TOR is I2P, which stands for Invisible Internet Project and which, broadly speaking, also uses encrypted communications jumping between various nodes of the network, with the aim of not being able to know the pages visited. To achieve this and instead of “onion routing”, it uses what is known as “garlic routing”. In any case, both routing share many common features.

This is an anonymous layer network and “network within network” designed to protect communication, avoid the monitoring in which the tunnels of entry and exit. To understand each other, when a device connects to I2P, choose two nodes to create an exit tunnel -A and B- and two others to create an entry tunnel -C and D-.

When sending a request to the network, the computer will send it to A, which will pass it to B -at the end of the tunnel- and which will send it to its destination; that is, to the entry node of the server to which the request is to be made. It should also be noted that one of the important differences with respect to TOR is how the nodes participating in the network are used. In the latter, not everyone participates and transmits traffic from others, whereas in I2P exactly this happens. In any case and for more technical clarifications we can consult the official platform.

OPTING FOR PRIVATE BROWSING, YES OR NO?

Beyond the comments and although this is a system that will not prevent us from being identified, we can opt for private browsing or incognito mode. A possibility offered by the majority of browsers on the market (Safari was the first to implement it back in 2005), perfect for, for example, using our accounts on another’s computer and then deleting any clue about us.

The idea is to tell the browser that, once we get out of it, we want to take care of deleting the history, cookies and other local data that may have been created during the session. It would serve, for example, to prevent our partner from knowing that we have been watching adult sites on the net by typing “adult content” in the address bar. In no case would the suggestion of the page in question appear to him that we have seen previously.

It should be noted here that this is a rather technical issue, since the websites we visit work in the same way and interpret indistinctly -both in private mode and in conventional mode- the browser’s request. In other words, they could follow us. Not to mention that some cookies can be stored in plugins such as Flash, which does not delete them when the incognito mode is closed.

Also, as we mentioned, we still have the problem of identification through IP, and even this can be done by more advanced methods. Nor does it prevent someone from monitoring our connection. Certain records present in the operating system, the DNS cache and others also hinder this theoretical camouflage that, in any case, is not bad at all to prevent us from appearing the typical recommendations of ads based on our searches.