**Anonymizing Your Online Presence: A Guide to Privacy Browsing**
We decided to put our anonymization tools to the test by researching flights and hotels online without revealing our location or identity. We started by searching for round trip flights from Canada, using both Expedia and a popular travel website that doesn't cater to Canadians due to their geolocation restrictions. To our surprise, we found that using one of these websites resulted in significantly cheaper prices than the other. The difference was over $100 CAD, which is a substantial amount considering taxes and fees.
Our first test showed us that anonymizing our search queries can lead to better deals online. This raises an important question: what's the point of anonymizing your data if you're not getting any real benefits? However, we decided to continue testing our tools to see how they perform in other areas. We used a public IP address generator called WhatIsMyIP.com to get a new IP address and visited a popular shopping website, Newegg.com.
We searched for video cards on the site, expecting to see some obnoxious ads that would be impossible to avoid with traditional browsing methods. However, we were surprised to find no graphics card ads at all! Instead, we saw ads for products unrelated to video cards, such as audio interfaces and accessories. This was a clear indication that our anonymization tools were working as intended.
However, we also tested the limits of our anonymization tools by disabling them and reloading the page. We expected to see some obnoxious ads this time around, but what we saw was completely irrelevant and lacking in personalization. It seemed that our anonymized browsing session was not tracked or targeted towards us.
The test was conclusive: our anonymization tools were effective at obscuring our data footprint from advertisers and other third parties. However, there are some limitations to consider. Browsing through the Tor network can be slow due to the multiple hops required for anonymity. Additionally, some modern web features, such as shopping carts that remember added items or websites that log you in automatically, may not work properly when anonymizing your browsing.
**The Importance of Private Browsing**
While our anonymization tools were effective at hiding our data from advertisers and third parties, they are not foolproof. No matter how secure or private a method is, there will always be weaknesses to exploit. As we continue to navigate the online world, it's essential to stay vigilant about our data protection and take steps to ensure that our personal information remains private.
**Private Browsing Tools**
For those interested in anonymizing their browsing sessions, there are several tools available that can help. One option is Private Internet Access (PIA), a VPN service that supports multiple protocols and encryption methods. PIA offers apps for Windows, Mac OS, Android, Linux, and Google Chrome, making it easy to connect from any device. They also provide features such as DNS leak protection, IPv6 leak protection, and an internet kill switch that blocks all traffic if the VPN becomes disconnected.
**Conclusion**
Anonymizing your online presence is a crucial step in protecting your personal data and maintaining your digital security. By using tools like our anonymization methods, Private Internet Access, or other VPN services, you can significantly reduce the risk of being tracked or targeted by advertisers and third parties. However, it's essential to stay informed about the limitations and potential weaknesses of these methods, as no solution is foolproof.
**Join the Conversation**
If you enjoyed this article, be sure to like, comment, and subscribe for more content on technology, security, and online privacy. You can also join our community forum or check out our merchandise store, which features cool shirts like this one. And if you're in the Tor browser, don't forget to use our link to get a free trial subscription!
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enlet's open with the most important thing to take away from this video simply switching on incognito mode or private browsing is not enough to keep your data safe online also just because you aren't doing anything illegal doesn't mean that no one is after your personal information and that there's no benefit to staying private thing is guys these days pretty much everyone and their dog is out to get your browsing data and that's not tinfoil hat paranoid delusional stuff the main reason is that companies and other organizations like political parties want your eyeballs glued to their message and the data that they get from your behavior online helps by giving them an advantage when they serve up those juicy ads everywhere that you frequent the good news is that staying private online is actually less difficult than you might think and pretty much anyone can do it so let's go through some easy strategies starting with one of our favorites using a vpn like private internet access for those of you new to vpns or virtual private networks they take in your data encrypt it then send it through their network of servers before forwarding it to the destination country of choice when the vpn sends your data out into the world towards the intended destination it decrypts the data and makes it look like the data originated from that exit point rather than your computer so whether you're torrenting or looking up content that might generate embarrassing ads in your browser the next time someone sits down at your computer we consider a vpn an essential part of staying safe online with that said while a vpn does secure your data in some ways making it so your isp can't tell what you're doing and allowing you to circumvent most firewall blocks when your information leaves the vpn network it's all still there and can be used to track you so a vpn is just one of the tools in our belt now let's talk about the onion router or tor as some of you know it we've actually covered tor before but the summary version goes a little something like this the onion router isn't a physical router like you'd think of plugging in in your home rather it's an internet networking protocol that's integrated into the tor web browser and it's designed to anonymize the data relayed across it so it keeps your online activity anonymous by encasing your traffic in multiple layers of encryption then sending it through a number of nodes that peel back those layers one at a time this makes it difficult if not impossible for snoops to see your webmail search history and other online activity now tor is also imperfect and leaves us vulnerable until our traffic reaches its network that's why we're using our pia vpn to mask that initial jump now thing is using a vpn can actually lead to issues if you are specifically being hunted by some government agency because your traffic will have a predictable exit point but for most people whose goal is to thwart more casual surveillance and advertisers this vulnerability isn't that important now incognito mode which by the way isn't useless plus a vpn and tor is pretty good and probably enough for most people but since we're going for the ultimate private setup we're going to take things a step further with our secret weapon the hey there it is super secure password the linux based tails is the operating system equivalent of your weird uncle after too many drinks it's designed to forget everything it ever heard or saw the entire os is built around the tor protocol and runs all internet traffic through the tor network not just your browser traffic one of the other key benefits of tails is that the os essentially runs off of your computer's ram so once you turn off the system poof any data that was lingering on it is gone and there's nothing to match your identity to the last browsing session another advantage of this solution is that you can take it with you and launch it on nearly any computer with a usb port so then now we are ready to browse the web anonymously almost the first thing you'll probably notice about the tor browser is how similar it looks to firefox and that's not by accident it's because it is firefox just set up to use the tor protocol and that's nice because it makes configuring all these little tweaks pretty familiar and straightforward so in no particular order regardless of our browser choice we want to make sure that javascript can't run we want to install the privacy badger extension to stop trackers and provide ad blocking and we want to set our default search engine to duckduckgo for what i hope would be fairly obvious reasons so then now we are fully ready to both browse the web and stick it to the man at the same time let's do a few tests here to see what that looks like so we've got two machines for our side by side test a completely vanilla one running windows and using google and then our tails linux one with the tor browser now something to note is that we're not actually using a vpn on either of these machines because here we're trying to get a representation of the worst case scenario and here pia actually doesn't recommend using their vpn from within tails although they do have a free proxy included with your account which they do say could be a good idea depending on what it is you're trying to achieve so let's go ahead and search for expedia um okay first hit is expedia.com this one expedia.ca so immediately our location has been anonymized and also expedia blocked us from even accessing their site that's cute did we know that was gonna happen no i didn't expect him to block tour expedia blocks tor let's try a different provider we can't tell if you're a human i'm human expedia dot co dot uk let me through it's like pretty sure i'm a bot hey taking it sweet time three freaking catches no we're good all right let's find a freaking flight here new york departing tomorrow okay let's do a quick search midirch now we haven't actually been researching flights and hotels so there may not be much benefit in terms of pricing to anonymizing any of this but there's only one way to find out all right so we're looking at 699 canadian round trip and 304 pounds let's do a quick conversion there 556. i just saved 145 dollars this is the same damn flight and it's over hundred dollars cheaper includes taxes and fees and then same in canada too including taxes and fees yep yep yep apples to apples you have you heard it here first expedia hates canadians now let's do another fun little test let's go to whatismyip.com that is in fact r.i.p and over here my public ip is some nonsense i've never seen or heard of before and i'm apparently based in basel bsch where the devil is that switzerland now let's do another fun little test let's go on a popular shopping website like say newegg.com now let's shop for let's say video cards maybe an phantom radeon7 uh what's a site with really really obnoxious ads ah what's that one based in australia that's like super obnoxious tweektown tweak town that's it thanks luke all right and let's have a look at what kind of ads are lurking for us on the page what do we have here vancouver to london vancouver to new delhi vancouver to lima and vancouver to san salvador shockingly they didn't manage to come up with any graphics cards ads which was sort of what i was going for here but i think we've made our point as for this well it looks like they're not getting any ad revenue from us which of course we feel pretty badly about as an ad supported enterprise ourselves but at the very least we are not being tracked across the internet which is the only reason that we enabled the ad blocking on this particular one in the first place you can of course anonymize your browsing significantly without blocking ads altogether just saying so for fun we're going to disable both privacy badger and u-block origin and reload this page so there's our ads but as you can see they are completely irrelevant so we've got some scarlet audio interfaces in whatever language this is and add for the stream deck accel that's in english at least an ad for corsair's hydrox series liquid cooling so there you go so that was a pretty compelling demonstration of the benefits of private browsing but it has some clear disadvantages as well now this machine on the right is actually faster than the one on the left but you guys might have noticed that browsing from within tails using the tor browser was slow as hell that's because the more hops you go through the more latency you're adding to the connection also some of the creature comforts that we've gotten used to on the modern web things like shopping carts that remember all the things that you added to them or websites that remember that you logged into them so you don't have to enter your password every time that stuff ain't gonna work over here also something to bear in mind guys is that no matter what you do it is going to be imperfect this was a fairly basic guide and privacy browsing is a rabbit hole and a half furthermore even on a properly set up machine while you're browsing and searching and almost all of your internet usage might be basically invisible nothing is bulletproof because the weakest point in the entire chain exists between the keyboard and the chair you and i are human and we are nothing if not creatures of habit and if someone is trying to find you your habits are likely to end up being the thing that gives you away with all of that said though for the vast majority of use cases following either of the methods that we laid out here should obscure your data footprint enough to make it nearly useless for advertisers and other parties speaking of advertisers this video is brought to you by pia private internet private internet access supports a variety of vpn protocols and types of encryption and authentication allowing you to dial in the level of privacy that you need they've got apps for windows mac os android linux and google chrome and you can connect up to five devices at once using a single account their apps include dns leak protection and ipv6 leak protection as well as their internet kill switch feature which blocks all traffic if the vpn becomes disconnected unexpectedly so check it out today at lmg dot gg slash pia linus two we're gonna have that linked down below so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the video description link below also down there is our merch store it has cool shirts like this one join our community forum it looks like that or like that if you're in the tor browser welllet's open with the most important thing to take away from this video simply switching on incognito mode or private browsing is not enough to keep your data safe online also just because you aren't doing anything illegal doesn't mean that no one is after your personal information and that there's no benefit to staying private thing is guys these days pretty much everyone and their dog is out to get your browsing data and that's not tinfoil hat paranoid delusional stuff the main reason is that companies and other organizations like political parties want your eyeballs glued to their message and the data that they get from your behavior online helps by giving them an advantage when they serve up those juicy ads everywhere that you frequent the good news is that staying private online is actually less difficult than you might think and pretty much anyone can do it so let's go through some easy strategies starting with one of our favorites using a vpn like private internet access for those of you new to vpns or virtual private networks they take in your data encrypt it then send it through their network of servers before forwarding it to the destination country of choice when the vpn sends your data out into the world towards the intended destination it decrypts the data and makes it look like the data originated from that exit point rather than your computer so whether you're torrenting or looking up content that might generate embarrassing ads in your browser the next time someone sits down at your computer we consider a vpn an essential part of staying safe online with that said while a vpn does secure your data in some ways making it so your isp can't tell what you're doing and allowing you to circumvent most firewall blocks when your information leaves the vpn network it's all still there and can be used to track you so a vpn is just one of the tools in our belt now let's talk about the onion router or tor as some of you know it we've actually covered tor before but the summary version goes a little something like this the onion router isn't a physical router like you'd think of plugging in in your home rather it's an internet networking protocol that's integrated into the tor web browser and it's designed to anonymize the data relayed across it so it keeps your online activity anonymous by encasing your traffic in multiple layers of encryption then sending it through a number of nodes that peel back those layers one at a time this makes it difficult if not impossible for snoops to see your webmail search history and other online activity now tor is also imperfect and leaves us vulnerable until our traffic reaches its network that's why we're using our pia vpn to mask that initial jump now thing is using a vpn can actually lead to issues if you are specifically being hunted by some government agency because your traffic will have a predictable exit point but for most people whose goal is to thwart more casual surveillance and advertisers this vulnerability isn't that important now incognito mode which by the way isn't useless plus a vpn and tor is pretty good and probably enough for most people but since we're going for the ultimate private setup we're going to take things a step further with our secret weapon the hey there it is super secure password the linux based tails is the operating system equivalent of your weird uncle after too many drinks it's designed to forget everything it ever heard or saw the entire os is built around the tor protocol and runs all internet traffic through the tor network not just your browser traffic one of the other key benefits of tails is that the os essentially runs off of your computer's ram so once you turn off the system poof any data that was lingering on it is gone and there's nothing to match your identity to the last browsing session another advantage of this solution is that you can take it with you and launch it on nearly any computer with a usb port so then now we are ready to browse the web anonymously almost the first thing you'll probably notice about the tor browser is how similar it looks to firefox and that's not by accident it's because it is firefox just set up to use the tor protocol and that's nice because it makes configuring all these little tweaks pretty familiar and straightforward so in no particular order regardless of our browser choice we want to make sure that javascript can't run we want to install the privacy badger extension to stop trackers and provide ad blocking and we want to set our default search engine to duckduckgo for what i hope would be fairly obvious reasons so then now we are fully ready to both browse the web and stick it to the man at the same time let's do a few tests here to see what that looks like so we've got two machines for our side by side test a completely vanilla one running windows and using google and then our tails linux one with the tor browser now something to note is that we're not actually using a vpn on either of these machines because here we're trying to get a representation of the worst case scenario and here pia actually doesn't recommend using their vpn from within tails although they do have a free proxy included with your account which they do say could be a good idea depending on what it is you're trying to achieve so let's go ahead and search for expedia um okay first hit is expedia.com this one expedia.ca so immediately our location has been anonymized and also expedia blocked us from even accessing their site that's cute did we know that was gonna happen no i didn't expect him to block tour expedia blocks tor let's try a different provider we can't tell if you're a human i'm human expedia dot co dot uk let me through it's like pretty sure i'm a bot hey taking it sweet time three freaking catches no we're good all right let's find a freaking flight here new york departing tomorrow okay let's do a quick search midirch now we haven't actually been researching flights and hotels so there may not be much benefit in terms of pricing to anonymizing any of this but there's only one way to find out all right so we're looking at 699 canadian round trip and 304 pounds let's do a quick conversion there 556. i just saved 145 dollars this is the same damn flight and it's over hundred dollars cheaper includes taxes and fees and then same in canada too including taxes and fees yep yep yep apples to apples you have you heard it here first expedia hates canadians now let's do another fun little test let's go to whatismyip.com that is in fact r.i.p and over here my public ip is some nonsense i've never seen or heard of before and i'm apparently based in basel bsch where the devil is that switzerland now let's do another fun little test let's go on a popular shopping website like say newegg.com now let's shop for let's say video cards maybe an phantom radeon7 uh what's a site with really really obnoxious ads ah what's that one based in australia that's like super obnoxious tweektown tweak town that's it thanks luke all right and let's have a look at what kind of ads are lurking for us on the page what do we have here vancouver to london vancouver to new delhi vancouver to lima and vancouver to san salvador shockingly they didn't manage to come up with any graphics cards ads which was sort of what i was going for here but i think we've made our point as for this well it looks like they're not getting any ad revenue from us which of course we feel pretty badly about as an ad supported enterprise ourselves but at the very least we are not being tracked across the internet which is the only reason that we enabled the ad blocking on this particular one in the first place you can of course anonymize your browsing significantly without blocking ads altogether just saying so for fun we're going to disable both privacy badger and u-block origin and reload this page so there's our ads but as you can see they are completely irrelevant so we've got some scarlet audio interfaces in whatever language this is and add for the stream deck accel that's in english at least an ad for corsair's hydrox series liquid cooling so there you go so that was a pretty compelling demonstration of the benefits of private browsing but it has some clear disadvantages as well now this machine on the right is actually faster than the one on the left but you guys might have noticed that browsing from within tails using the tor browser was slow as hell that's because the more hops you go through the more latency you're adding to the connection also some of the creature comforts that we've gotten used to on the modern web things like shopping carts that remember all the things that you added to them or websites that remember that you logged into them so you don't have to enter your password every time that stuff ain't gonna work over here also something to bear in mind guys is that no matter what you do it is going to be imperfect this was a fairly basic guide and privacy browsing is a rabbit hole and a half furthermore even on a properly set up machine while you're browsing and searching and almost all of your internet usage might be basically invisible nothing is bulletproof because the weakest point in the entire chain exists between the keyboard and the chair you and i are human and we are nothing if not creatures of habit and if someone is trying to find you your habits are likely to end up being the thing that gives you away with all of that said though for the vast majority of use cases following either of the methods that we laid out here should obscure your data footprint enough to make it nearly useless for advertisers and other parties speaking of advertisers this video is brought to you by pia private internet private internet access supports a variety of vpn protocols and types of encryption and authentication allowing you to dial in the level of privacy that you need they've got apps for windows mac os android linux and google chrome and you can connect up to five devices at once using a single account their apps include dns leak protection and ipv6 leak protection as well as their internet kill switch feature which blocks all traffic if the vpn becomes disconnected unexpectedly so check it out today at lmg dot gg slash pia linus two we're gonna have that linked down below so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the video description link below also down there is our merch store it has cool shirts like this one join our community forum it looks like that or like that if you're in the tor browser well\n"
