In connection with the recent revelations of various kinds of intelligence services of foreign countries, many users have developed almost a persecution mania. They are interested in how to save their personal data, in droves delete their accounts from social networks.
To some extent, all these actions are justified, but much more important for the real preservation of anonymity is to learn to "not litter" on the network during daily visits to sites. An anonymous browser will help you with this. What is it and how does it work? We will try to answer all these questions in this article.
Definition of a concept
What kind of Internet browser is this, which ensures the safety of user data? Let's figure it out by looking at the anonymous Tor browser.
Since it is based on the source code of the notorious Firefox, its extension FoxyProxy is widely used to ensure anonymity. In addition, data is distributed across hundreds of thousands of independent servers, so intercepting them is almost impossible.
This is also facilitated by the fact that all transmitted information is encrypted: coupled with breaking it into thousands of fragments that are sent independently, the risk of revealing your identity is minimal.
Because of this “layering”, this anonymous browser has a bulb on its logo. All technologies that developers embed in their brainchild are aimed at reducing the effectiveness of traffic analysis mechanisms that operate in many countries of the world.
What is all this for?
Reading all of the above, you can come to the conclusion that only intruders can take care of hiding the traces of their activities on the Internet. Alas, but quite law-abiding citizens every year more and more have to deal with this.
What is the matter here? And the reason lies in the notorious blocking sites that spoiled a lot of blood for domestic users. The law on cessation of access to them works very badly: our deputies took the path of least resistance, deciding to limit requests to resources by IP.
As a result, dozens of normal sites that hang on the same hosting services on which truly unreliable resources "reside" turn out to be undeservedly blocked. Any anonymous browser is designed to fight this injustice.
How to protect your browser?
Since the use of “Thor” is far from suitable for everyone, we will consider the process of converting the usual “Flame” or “Chrome” into its analogues. This is not at all difficult to do: since both of these browsers support the use of extensions, we will use them.
For starters, you should install the FoxyProxy plugin mentioned above. What is its role? The fact is that it allows you to literally a couple of mouse clicks switch the browser to use anonymous proxies. Of course, you can use the “Setup-Network” item for this, but it’s rather tedious to go through this menu each time.
In addition, the plugin allows you to encrypt the data stream. Without this, no anonymous browser can do its job.
Secondly, turning your browser into an impregnable bastion, be sure to install the Ghostery extension. This useful addition hides traces of your stay on the sites, and also removes the buttons of all social networks, tracking cookies and other things that can reveal your identity when you visit a particular site.
Finally, remember to install NoScript. This plugin completely blocks all scripts, which not only serve for the operation of certain specific functions of the sites, but also for revealing your location.
What else?
What other ways to protect your own anonymous Internet browser from encroachment from the outside? First of all, it is worth using anonymous proxy servers. They guarantee you complete confidentiality when accessing any Internet resource.
They can be found on the relevant sites, which are located on any normal search service. Where to insert them? Consider this process using Firefox as an example. Click on the settings button located in the upper left corner. In the dialog box, you need to find the "Advanced" tab. There is an internal tab "Network" in which you need to click on the "Configure" button.
The Connection Settings dialog box appears. It is necessary to enter the data on the proxy server in the "Manual proxy services settings" field.
How to do it in Google Chrome
In this browser, all this is no harder to do. In the upper right part of its working window there is a settings button. After clicking it, a drop-down list appears in which to select the "Settings" item. It has a button "Change proxy server settings." In the window that opens, all settings are entered in the same way.
Finally
Please do not consider all of the above in the context of criminal access to truly pirated sites. We already mentioned that many portals are completely undeservedly blocked, just because of the imperfection of the locking mechanism.
It often happens that in the "disgrace" are even sites that illuminate the process of manufacturing plastic windows or something like that. What kind of piracy can we talk about here? Of course, users have the right to receive information that was blocked by mistake. And browser anonymity should help.