Protecting your online anonymity

Protecting your online anonymity and wifi is not child’s play. Ultimately, today’s Internet ecosystem – which is increasingly monitored and advertising-oriented – is trying to achieve the exact opposite. Whether it’s about national security or convincing you of a product, marketers and authorities want to find out everything about you.

That’s why it’s not easy to shake them off your trail. Although it’s possible to hide your browser history and stay anonymous online, we’re not kidding ourselves – it gets harder and harder as time goes by. Although there isn’t much you can do, you can take some steps to make it harder for others to expose you, at least to some extent.

Anonymity on the Internet has its advantages, because you can gain certain freedoms by being unrecognizable. But how can you keep your digital footprints safe, especially in this era of mass surveillance? In this sense, the following tools are ideal for safely surfing the Internet without being tracked:

Use the Chrome extension of PureVPN

A VPN is one of the best solutions to protect you. Did you know that PureVPN’s Chrome extension gives you instant online protection and anonymity with just a few clicks? With servers in 35 countries around the globe and access to the best VPN features such as WebRTC protection, malware, advertising and tracker protection and integrated VPN features, you have everything you need to ensure anonymity and privacy. I tried it myself and was personally very impressed, so in this section I recommend it before other VPN services.

The extension is something like an IP changer for the Chrome browser and has no significant effect on your surfing speed. In addition, the Chrome extension of PureVPN also has the additional features of a tracker and ad blocker to protect your online activities from prying eyes and allow you to get rid of annoying ads and malicious files disguised as advertisements!

Use Tor

Tor – also known as „The Onion Router“ – uses a series of relays and nodes to camouflage your traffic and hide your identity by disguising origin and IP addresses. Although there are a number of ways to use the anonymity network, the Tor browser is considered the best privacy option.

Just install the Firefox-based application on your PC or Mac and start surfing the web anonymously. However, Tor has some disadvantages. For one thing, it’s not suitable for downloading files via torrents or streaming videos because it offers a much slower surfing speed. Second, your ISP can tell if you’re using Tor or not, even if your traffic is untraceable and encrypted.

  • Since Tor is often used by criminals and hackers to launch online attacks and blackmail, this alone can be enough to arouse suspicion.
  • Your ISP can limit your bandwidth, send you a warning, or at worst report you to law enforcement, even if you haven’t done anything illegal or particularly wrong.

Use a proxy

If you use a proxy server and enter the URL of the Web site you want to visit, the pages are retrieved by the proxy, not by the person who is actually surfing the Internet (that is, by you). As a result, the remote server does not see your IP address and other browser information because it is replaced by that of the proxy server.

Although this ensures that you remain anonymous online, the bad news is that many proxies record your data to sell it or infect your system to turn your PC into a bot that is then used for a DDoS attack without you ever knowing about it. In addition, not only will your browsing speed slow down, but your browser window will also be overrun with annoying advertisements (well, you have to make money somehow, don’t you?).

Are you really ever anonymous?

The answer is a simple no. You are never really anonymous and for this reason you should never do anything online, say or search before you are aware of the dangers and know that someone can watch you. BUT you can use these tools to minimize the information that is available to curious eyes, tracking and later use in personalized advertising.