Gain Anonymity by Learning How to Use TOR

Do you always feel that you're being watched by prying eyes as you visit your favorite websites? Are you someone on the run, and need to be untraceable online? Do you feel the need to cover your tracks when you do your online activities? Are you paranoid that someone can just look up your IP address then trace your ISP account? If you are, then look no more. There are a few tools out there that can help you become harder to trace online. 

But it's really possible to trace you. Have you seen one of those movies where hackers get caught exactly where they live? That part is no fiction. It's really possible to trace you. Every time you visit a website, you live some traces on the web server's logs. One of these things that you leave behind is called an IP address. Even devices which pass your traffic across the Internet can see some details about you by looking at your traffic's IP headers. 

Once people can get a hold of this... BAM!!! They'll know where you live, and if they can some more information from the ISP, they'll get your name and so on...

There are many other ways to get your identity. But let's start with that. 

One of the things tech people do to gain anonymity online is a tool called the TOR proxy. TOR works through a  series of relays that keep changing paths. That way, it would be difficult to trace you back and even see where your traffic is heading.

To those who are intersted on how this works, more details can be found here - https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en. 

To prove that it's easy to get your IP address, go to this site (Figure A) - http://www.whatismyip.com/. Or just type "what is my ip" in Google (Figure B) and it will spit out Your public IP address is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. It's that easy.

Figure A

Figure B

Now, let's use TOR.

The easiest way to do it would be to use the TOR Browser Bundle. You can find your corresponding OS in the TOR site - https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en/. Then just download your respective version (like Windows or Linux or Mac). 

After downloading it, extract the compressed file to a directory of your choosing (like your desktop) using our favorite tool like Winzip, Winrar, or 7zip.

I choose 7zip because it's free and can open all formats whether it's a .zip file, .rar file, etc...

After extracting the .exe file will create a folder, which is aptly named Tor Browser. Just click on that folder, and look for the Start Tor Browser.exe file. Click on that. Just sit back and relax as the program will connect you to the TOR network and bring up the TOR browser. See Figure C below.

Figure C

I also made a short video on the entire installation on youtube which you can find below.