I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the best way to be as private and as anonymous as possible on the internet. Here’s my attempt to unravel them all.
Two concepts are the most important to understand in this: privancy and anonymity, which are a bit different.
Privacy - controlling who sees what about you Anonymity - being completely unknown
Essentially, privacy exists on a spectrum where anonymity is one end of the spectrum, and the other end is…well complete openness and public facing. The opposite of anonymyity would be pretty difficult to get 100%. We’ve never seen Taylor Swift take a leak, for example. from writing on a white board projected onto timesquare, to closing the door to your room, to blocking trackers online to complete anonymity.
When I’m thinking about how to be private on the internet, I’m thinking that I like to aim for anonymity as much as possible. This of course, is not possible, becuase work requires that my identity is known, and sometimes I’ll want to walk around and interact with merchants for example.
Browsers + VPN go a long way to getting us to anonymity. The way I’m thinking about it is: who knows what I’m doing and when?
Here’s the pathway:
Me -> ISP -> Website -> ISP -> Me
So now, if I put a VPN on it goes:
Me-> ISP ->VPN ->Website ->VPN -> ISP -> Me
In this case, my ISP now only sees that I’m using a VPN to see websites, not what websites I’m on. However, when I’m on websites, maybe going to multiple ones, if I’m using Google Chrome or safari, or some other rawdog browser, now all of those sites can profile my usage based on telemetry.
Fingerprinting is a description of your IP address + a bunch of other metrics like your screen resolution, device type, internet speed, and other things that can be used to identify you in a pseudonymous way, and if you log into an account on one of those websites they now know everything about you. Not only does that website know everything about you, but because of trackers (facebook pixel, google analytics, etc), any other website you visit can also profile you (and maybe even know your name).
- Mullvad uses *resistFingerprinting* standardly (this can be enabled on Zen or Firefox as well). This makes all browsers appear the same.
- Brave uses **Farbling** which randomizes the fingerprint between websites, making it difficult for a website to track you.
- Zen browser doesn't have anti-fingerprinting enabled, but you can enable resistFingerprinting and ublockorigin extenstions to help make it more like mullvad (but never the same)
Telemetry is when the browser sends fingerprinting (and other stuff) back to the developer. This can be used for benign purposes like browser development, or ad tracking and other tracking. None of the privacy focused browsers allow telemetry. Chrome safari and edge are telemetry monsters.
Tor browser is the next hurdle. This provides anonymity on the internet, due to its node structure. First, its run in a decentralized way, meaning there is nobody to ship telemetry back to, and then all your traffic is run through three nodes, so its like having 3 individual VPNs when it comes to what the website sees. Using a “no-log’ VPN with Tor will block the ISP from knowing you are using Tor, which is good because Tor can seem suspicious. However, maybe using Tor out in the open is good practice to normalize it.