When doing your online browsing, along with your desired search result, online freedom and online-security are among the list of your main objectives. In a world dominated by the internet, is there any guaranteed way to stay anonymous online? Especially to answer this question, we wrote this article to help you guide over how you can stay anonymous online.
Even though the internet was initially created as a place that guarantees anonymity for free speech, but years after its massive web spread all around us, privacy is hardly given. And even as per some researches, today, almost 69% of data breaches are done through the internet and are related to identity theft.
Valuable Tips & Tricks to Help You Guarantee Top Level Online Security
All the websites that we visit, the accounts we make on social media, the things that we post online, the things we watch online, and every single thing that we do online, are all recorded by different companies for their profit.
With all that going, it can be hard to stay completely anonymous. But there are some steps you can take to maintain your top-level online privacy.
1 Set Your Browserâs Privacy Settings
Your browser stores a lot of the information about your activities on the internet. The sites you visit, the services you use, and the passwords to each of your accounts. When you visit an unencrypted website, the risk of exposure is doubled. An unencrypted website is one that does not contain HTTPS in its URL. Some websites also monitor the traffic on their web pages but the alarming part is, they can monitor a lot more than just the visitors. Your IP address, browser, and your screen resolution can all be viewed by such companies.
To ensure anonymity while browsing, you must first reduce the information you provide to your web browser. There are a few steps you can take to do that:
- Browse in incognito mode to hide the sites you visit.
- Empty your browserâs cookies after a few days. This will clear your cache memory and help reduce the digital footprint you leave behind.
- In your browserâs settings menu, turn off the automatic password storage.
2 Try to Use an Anonymous Browser
Using private search engines like DuckDuckGo or Ghostery etc. allows users to get the same search results without the risk of keeping tracks. Even Firefox has taken amazing steps to ensure user privacy and automatically block trackers. The services might not be as efficient as Google on such browsers, but the results are pretty much the same with an added privacy.
3 Take Full Advantage of Any Reliable VPN
Almost everything that you do online can be traced to one set of numbers and that is your IP address. In order to browse anonymously online, you must first hide your IP address. Virtual Private Networks or VPNs mask your IP address and provide anonymity regarding your location by assigning another IP address to your computer.
VPNs are a go-to when trying to browse the web privately. There are many VPNs available online and are easily purchasable but you must conduct thorough research on the type of VPN you want to invest in.
4 Keep Your Email Private
Your email address is the home of your online presence. It can be used to create all your accounts and almost every website that requires registration can be accessed easily through it. However, some fraudulent companies and people use this tiny bit of information to hack into your system using spam. If you register on a site using your email address and the site turns out to be insecure, your user credentials can easily be hacked through the websiteâs database.
To maintain privacy online, you can use a throwaway account and use it for a short period of time. If you need to register on a website, you can use these kinds of email accounts to complete the whole process after which it will be dissolved on its own. To get a throwaway email account, go to GuerrilaMail.
5 Get Rid of Spam Emails
Receiving spam emails on your email address that corrupts the whole system is fairly common these days. You go to a website; you provide your email ID and wham!
The next day you start revving floods and floods of irrelevant ads and spam emails that annoy you to your core. To avoid a situation like this, you can use an anonymous email service like ProtonMail which is free to use and user-friendly.
6 Go Dark
Some people think of the dark web as somewhat taboo and an underside of the internet. However, with time, it has proved its usefulness and for one good reason: online anonymity.
Tor, also known as the âonion routerâ is a network of computers that are spread across the globe. It allows you to surf the internet by redirecting your outgoing traffic through the mesh of computers. Your connection takes a random path and comes out at another random destination, and therefore is untraceable.
Even though these are some steps you can take to play safe on the web, however, complete anonymity online can only be ensured if you do not have a presence online. One way or the other, you are providing some relevant piece of information about yourself on the web, no matter how hard you avoid it.
Conclusion
When surfing online, everybody wants top-level online security – an ultimate goal of every internet user. To achieve that goal for our users, we tried to write an article covering every single way that can keep you 100% secure while being online.
As we put our full effort, we are hopeful that you would have gain something out of reading this article. But still, if you have any queries in your mind, please let us know in the comment section. We appreciate your efforts!
