Win your privacy back... with TOR, DuckDuckGo and others

When you are watching a spy movie and the agent is trying to track someone on the Internet. Only to be foiled by the Nemesis' protecting his anonymity by bouncing his traffic around the world, making it impossible to trace. This is not just the thing of fiction. Its called Tor. Its real, free and open source...

This blog post will cover why you should use services like Tor, Duck Duck Go or others to protect your privacy and hopefully discover that it isn't wrong to want to keep some of your life private and not feel like a criminal.



When your using the Internet assume that your being watched. There are the accepted watchers: ISP, Search engines, Social networks and cookies. There are the unacceptable watchers, the ones with evil intent: Using snooping software or trojan. And many in between, so it's a safe assumption that you are being watched. Be it in real time or by reviewing the trace you have left. A server log, facebook post, viewed YouTube video or search history are left behind for who knows how long. So before you delete your Facebook account, cancel your connection and go back to pen and paper, there are things you can do.

 

Search 

If you trust google then there is nothing to worry about. They will store your OS, browser, IP address, location, search queries and clicked results, and you in return get access to their search index. For most searches this is acceptable but you should have a choice when to be private. So what are the choices:

• Logging out of your Google account: this will not stop them collecting the data but it is no longer assigned to your account. This makes it slightly harder but not impossible to track you. Google has also made it nearly impossible to log out because it's account is required for all its services: Gmail, Calendar, blogger and even Android. 
• Using another search engine: again this will not stop them collecting the data but it will stop just one company monopolizing your data. But why do this sounds like too much effort to me. 
• DuckDuckGo is a search engine that doesn't track you. PERIOD. It really is a geeks search engine because there are loads of commands or !bangs that enables you to do tailored search of specific websites or features. Some examples are: !ducky which is like the "I'm feeling lucky" feature; !images shows only images; and !XDA will search xda. There are many many more. My only negative is I don't like the interface but it could be because I am used to Google. 

What I do: I use a combination of DuckDuckGo and Google for when I choose to be tracked or not. 

 

Social network 

Using services like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter is a double edged blade... The obvious privacy concerns are that people who over share could end up diverging information to family, friends or potential employers that could be negative. But these sites will track you outside the wall of the website by using services like Facebook's "like" and Google's "+" this information is then sold to advertisers. It might be acceptable to be traced using a social network but not after you have left it....

The "named internet" is necessary if you want to use facebook or google+ but there are alternatives. Out of the anonymous social networks, the most popular of them is 4chan. But be warned with anonymity means 18+ material.

What I do: Lifehacker has a great article on how to lock down social networks from tracing you outside its domain. I also turn off third party cookies.

In Facebook specifically I have created groups for colleagues, real friends, family etc, these help me separate my social groups and I also approval all content my friends tag me in...

Everything 

Developed by the US Navy and code donated to the open source community. TOR makes you pretty much 100% anonymous. By bouncing between nodes, your location and IP address are hidden. All traffic is encrypted and each node only knows its last node so all traffic is encrypted and origin-less.  Your ISP will see encrypted traffic, websites will not see your location or  IP address and cookies are deleted after the session. The overhead however is performance, encryption and node bouncing take its toll on speed.

TOR gives you a platform to do anything anonymously but you cannot sign into any website (facebook or google) because once you do you will be trackable.

What I do: Download the TOR-Browser bundle for linux (other OS's are available) and you will have everything you need to get started. 

 

Conclusion 

This blog has brought together the tools but you need to decide how you would like to use them. Privacy is a personal and private decision. You have a right to be anonymous but that doesn't mean you have to use it. You can read and acknowledge this blog and decide to ignore it. That's your decision. If you know of any other tools please post in comments.

 

In closing its a good idea to review your Internet footprint and think about what you would leave if you died tomorrow.