Online Anonymity — A Myth or a Matter of the Right Tools?

Is anonymity on the internet possible in the era of total surveillance, when every action leaves a digital footprint? This question is becoming more acute than ever against the backdrop of a growing number of high-profile personal data leaks, cases of online harassment, and increased digital censorship — all of which clearly demonstrate user vulnerability in terms of privacy. Achieving absolute anonymity on the global network today is practically impossible — there are too many information collection points and levels of control. But with the help of effective anonymization tools, you can significantly increase your level of privacy and control your own data.

How to do this — we explain in the article.

What is internet anonymity?

Anonymity on the internet is a state in which a user's personal information cannot be identified — name, IP address, phone number, and other data. In other words, it is the ability to be on the Web without revealing your identity.

There is a conditional division into three levels of online anonymity:

• Basic — protection against targeted advertising and tracking by websites
• Medium — protection against data leaks and surveillance by government agencies
• Advanced — protection against de-anonymization and targeted attacks on your identity (relevant for political activists, journalists, etc.)

Contrary to popular belief, a VPN does not provide you with anonymity on the internet, nor does incognito mode in a browser. Achieving absolute anonymity is very difficult in principle, but based on the division mentioned above, special tools do exist, and we will analyze them in order.

How to ensure anonymity on the internet

There are a number of technologies that hide your identity from others. Some of them are enough to hide from ubiquitous targeting, while others are needed only in case of targeted attempts on your anonymity on the internet.

Tools for achieving a basic level of anonymity

To hide from the algorithms of advertising and social networks, you practically do not need special knowledge — it is enough to know what software to choose so as not to show your personal data to everyone around you.

Browsers

Chrome, Opera, and Mozilla are real machines for collecting users' personal information. A good alternative to them would be anti-detect browsers like Linken Sphere or Dolphin Anty, which allow you to hide your digital footprint. This is achieved by spoofing system parameters.

Brave can also be included here: it is a regular browser focused on protecting privacy and blocking third-party trackers. Brave blocks advertising banners, third-party cookies, and attempts by sites to collect your unique fingerprint.

Privacy settings and plugins

In addition to browsers, you can use local tools to ensure privacy. For example:

1. Privacy Badger — An extension created by the human rights organization EFF, it analyzes the behavior of the sites you visit and blocks hidden trackers along with attempts to take a fingerprint.
2. uBlock Origin — The plugin has a huge database of trackers and stops attempts by web resources to use them. Blocking advertising scripts is also included.
3. NoScript — This extension blocks Java, JavaScript, and other potentially dangerous site elements by default. To use the internet without restrictions, simply add the necessary and trusted web resources to the whitelist — this way NoScript works proactively against any possible vulnerabilities.

Privacy-first search engines

Google or Yandex allow you to get a huge array of the data you need in a second, but for this, search engines issue you an invisible bill: all information about your activity is collected into a single digital profile and then used to show relevant advertising. But there are also search engines that do not monetize every user click:

1. DuckDuckGo — The site does not store your search history and does not link it to your IP address. It collects search results from multiple sources, including its own crawler bot, crowdsourced data, and partnership agreements with other search engines.
2. Startpage — This search engine is essentially a full-fledged intermediary between you and Google: it redirects your request there, but on its own behalf. And with the help of the proxy function, you can visit sites from the search results under the IP address of Startpage itself.

Both DuckDuckGo and Startpage are a breath of fresh air in the field of online search: no contextual advertising and 24/7 data collection.

Password managers

Today, every user has dozens of accounts on various sites. Remembering everything is difficult, and keeping one password for all personal records is unsafe for obvious reasons. But there is a solution — password managers:

• LastPass
• 1Password
• Bitwarden
• Built-in managers (Google Chrome, iCloud Keychain), etc.

Data in managers is stored in encrypted form: even if they are hacked, attackers will only see a meaningless set of characters. The main thing is to remember the master password for the manager, through which you have access to all data combinations.

Alternative email services

Email is one of the main obstacles to achieving complete anonymity on the internet. It is through email that passwords are recovered and registrations on sites are confirmed. And in Gmail, Yahoo, and other email agents, letters are stored unencrypted and analyzed to show targeted advertising.

The alternative is to use mailboxes on ProtonMail and Tutanota. They provide clients with End-to-end encryption: a technology in which a letter is encrypted on your device even before it is sent to the server. And tracking protection guarantees complete confidentiality of your data from all sides.

Private messengers

Messaging applications collect a huge stream of everyday data and, of course, also use it for commercial purposes. Many of them still offer End-to-end encryption, but only upon request, and do not enable it by default. And in WhatsApp, for example, even with encryption enabled, there is a continuous collection of metadata: who you communicate with, what devices you use, and from what IP address you are sitting.

The solution would be to switch to messengers with a focus on privacy. Signal and Wire have no internal advertising, which means there is no motivation to collect your data, and end-to-end encryption works by default. For those who are used to classic tools, there is an option to stay in Telegram, but then it is better to switch to secret chats that exist only on the devices from which they were created and have a self-destruct function.

Tools for achieving a medium level of anonymity

If the basic level is not enough and you want more reliable protection against data leaks, consider the following set of tools.

VPN

This technology hides your real IP address and encrypts all traffic between the device and the Web. But a VPN does not give you anonymity on the internet by default, but only redirects the focus from your provider to its own. At the same time, its server still sees your data and keeps logs — a journal of your online activity.

Some VPN services do not keep logs, which means they do not track you. This can be afforded by companies registered in neutral jurisdictions: Panama, the British Virgin Islands, Switzerland, etc. It is better to turn to them than to services from other countries, whose local laws oblige platforms to collect and store user data.

Another important point is protection against leaks through two channels:

• DNS — In this case, due to some failure, your device sends a request to connect to the site not through the VPN, but directly to the provider. To eliminate such excesses, you need to enable the DNS leak blocking option in the VPN service or register the addresses of private DNS servers in the network connection settings.
• WebRTC — This technology allows browsers to communicate directly using Javascript. Because of it, your browser can give the site your real IP address and other information. To block this leak, it is enough to use special extensions like the previously described uBlock Origin or WebRTC Leak Prevent.

Special operating systems

Windows, MacOS, and even Linux were not originally designed with anonymity in mind. They cache data, store logs, and inevitably leave traces behind. But there are OSs that solve this problem, and by completely different methods.

1. Tails — a live system that is not installed on a hard drive like Windows, but literally boots from a flash drive or disk. All work in it takes place in the computer's RAM. As soon as you turn off the PC, Tails erases information about everything that happened during the last session, and all internet traffic is routed through the TOR network, which we will discuss below. Tails also has many built-in additional tools for anonymity on the internet: from a messenger with encrypted messages to a password manager.

2. Qubes OS — an OS characterized by low performance, but which maximally isolates and hides all internal processes. This is not a single system, but many isolated virtual machines based on Xen. To simplify it as much as possible, it is as if you are sitting at several different computers at the same time. And even when a data leak occurs from one of them, overall you do not reveal yourself and can continue to use the Web safely.

TOR

This is perhaps the most famous tool for ensuring anonymity on the internet. It works on the basis of The Onion Router — software and an eponymous network of proxy servers that provides anonymity on the internet through multi-layered traffic encryption. "Onion routing" hides the user's IP address and protects against network activity analysis by passing data through random nodes — each node decrypts only its own "layer," like an onion, without knowing the full route. None of them sees the whole picture of the user's actions, and relative anonymity is achieved through such distribution and isolation of data.

To use TOR correctly, adhere to a few important rules:

1. Do not change the browser window size — A strange piece of advice, but in fact, this is one of the key parameters of a user's digital footprint. If you maximize the window to full screen or change it manually, your browser will become unique and can be tracked.
2. Do not install additional extensions — No AdBlock, Privacy Badger, LastPass, etc. — they all break the protection. And their analogs, as a rule, are already built into the functionality of TOR.
3. Always activate the highest security level — This may disrupt the operation of sites based on Javascript, but it will provide you with a high level of anonymity.

Additional anonymization methods

To the above technologies, we will add two more tools that can complement bundles to achieve anonymity on the internet:

1. Virtual machines — These are programs that emulate the operation of other computers on your device. As a result, you use a standard PC, but to the site's server, you are on a completely different computer.
2. 2FA — This is the use of TOTP applications to receive confirmation codes instead of SMS. This does not add anonymity to you, but it significantly increases the reliability of working with all accounts.

Anonymity on the internet is systematic work: it is important to consider every detail. All layers of protection can fall before one careless decision — for example, ignoring two-factor authentication, which makes it much easier for an attacker to hack your account.

Tools for achieving an advanced level of anonymity

We are gradually moving to more complex data encryption technologies. They will be useful if targeted attacks are being carried out against you, and you need to protect your identity as reliably as possible.

Protection against traffic analysis

Suppose the content of your messages is securely protected. But here is the nuance — they can still be analyzed by metadata: who you communicate with, at what time, what volume of data, and with what frequency you transmit. To encrypt this information as well, you can use two different methods.

First, Onion Routing, which we discussed above. In this case, the message passes through many layers of encryption, while each node does not have the full picture and simply transmits information with a certain degree of encryption. At the exit, an observer sitting at one point in the chain sees only encrypted packets leading nowhere.

Second, I2P — an anonymous network for internal services (sites, files, chats, etc.). Here, several messages are added to one packet, sometimes for different recipients, and a certain number of random bytes are also added to them, making the information completely depersonalized. Messages in I2P are transmitted through tunnels that work for a conditional 10 minutes, after which they are recreated with new encryption keys.

Hiding metadata

All the files you use have certain information about themselves. For example, for photos, this is:

• GPS coordinates
• Phone model
• Date and time of shooting
• Shooting settings
• Copyrights, etc.

To maintain anonymity on the internet, you need to delete them too. Special programs will help with this — for example, Metadata Cleaner, ExifCleaner, AnyEXIF, and MetaStripper. Use them before uploading files to the internet, because it will be impossible to clear metadata in already posted photos and videos.

Secure communication

Cryptographic methods can help enhance the privacy of your data, making it practically invulnerable to cracking. For example, Pretty Good Privacy is a program that uses two cryptography methods at once to encrypt user messages. It is open-source and has no central server that could be hacked or shut down.

And Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) is a protocol that simulates a conversation between two interlocutors in a closed room: you can be sure that you are communicating with the right person, and no one else will know exactly what you were talking about. OTR does not support group chats and does not encrypt file transfers, but it works perfectly for personal chats and instant messages.

Operating system hardening, risk assessment, and taking appropriate measures

Hardening is the process of configuring an OS to maximize its security. It is based on a number of clear principles:

1. Principle of least privilege — a user or program should have exactly as many rights as they need to perform their respective functions, and not an iota more.
2. Minimality — the fewer programs and services installed, the fewer potential holes for leaks on the device.
3. Security by default — any changes that increase the convenience of working with the system must be made taking security requirements into account.
4. Segmentation — dividing networks into isolated elements. For example, if an attacker hacks your Wi-Fi, they should not immediately gain access to your home network storage.

Hardening can be called the final act of anonymization, but in fact, it should come first. Lay out any possible risks and threats, analyze what measures you will need to take to protect yourself from them, and take action.

Strategies for maintaining anonymity on the internet

Regardless of the tools used, do not forget about simple and effective measures to protect privacy:

1. Regular password changes and software updates. This is basic information hygiene that closes most holes and cuts off attackers' access to long-existing vulnerabilities.
2. Caution when publishing personal information. If data can be used against you, do not post it in the public domain — this will save you from any negative consequences.
3. Checking application and website permissions. Analyze what rights various clients demand from you — for example, a simple calculator is unlikely to need access to contacts.
4. Using different accounts for different purposes. Use some accounts for work, others for personal communication, and so on. This can best be implemented through an anti-detect browser infrastructure.
5. Fighting the digital footprint. Take the time to clean up previously published information about yourself from forums and social networks, since each such account can be hacked and used against you and your loved ones.
6. Regularly checking privacy settings and tools. Technologies change every day, and it will not be superfluous to check and improve your protection methods once in a certain period of time.
7. Using secure payment methods. Use cryptocurrencies and prepaid cards to pay for services on untrusted sites so as not to compromise your main payment data.

It is important to understand that anonymity on the internet is not a one-time setup, but a constant and systematic process. Its success directly depends on how much time and attention you devote to it.

Conclusion

Anonymity on the internet and the use of appropriate tools must be approached competently and consciously — first of all, it must be ethical and safe, and you will still have to bear responsibility for illegal actions committed anonymously. But if you value the confidentiality of personal data, simply use the technologies discussed in the article and regularly check their performance. Good luck!