Online Anonymity: A Brief How To

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In my previous post, I discussed Online Anonymity, its importance and how it is different from Online Privacy. Now that the importance of Online Anonymity has been highlighted, the question my five readers have in mind now is "how do we maintain our Online Anonymity?"

Question Mark, Hacker, Attack, Mask, Internet

First things first: in order to use the internet with Online Privacy in mind will require a paradigm shift -- in order to surf the net anonymously, we must try to relearn some of the things we are used to doing when accessing the internet in the convectional way.  Here are some things that we are all used to doing but should not practice if we want to access the internet Anonymously:

  • use an anonymizing browser such as TOR Brower.
  • when searching for information or anything else, do not use Google, Bing or Yahoo.  These search engines keeps a record of all searches, including which users did the search.
  • never log in to any of your usual social media sites.  Once logged in, these social media sites will save a piece of code (called cookies) on your system which will enable those sites to track your succeeding destination on the web.
  • speaking of cookies, never allow any of the websites you visit to save a cookie on your system when prompted (easier said than done).
  • avoid using free wifi in public places.  Not only does the provider of this free service collect information about the devices that uses it, it also keeps a record of the sites visited by those connected devices.
  • if you need to send/receive emails anonymously, use privacy-centric service like Protonmail, Hushmail, etc.

The tips listed above is by no means a complete list of activities that will give 100% anonymity but it is a good start and the tips are good practice in maintaining your Cyber Hygiene.

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