Anonymity on the Internet for beginners

Every hour thousands of users search and find a wide variety of information. However, when using the Internet for their personal purposes, they all leave certain data about themselves. This data can be used for full or partial identification.

Any access to the network is not complete without obtaining and then providing an IP address. This is, in fact, the number by which you are identified as an Internet user, and any action on the network is linked to this number.

What can openness on the web lead to?
Having an IP address on your "hands", you can deanonymize it – get information about the owner of this IP.

For what purpose is such data collected?

The most common goal today is to collect user statistics. The collection is carried out by special programs, through which the user's location and some other data are determined in the future;
A less common goal is to collect information about illegal actions. Law enforcement agencies, in particular, have the right to request personal data from Internet providers;
A simple goal is the interest of frequent persons. This is the so-called profiling – when the activity of Internet data (in our case, IP) is logically correlated to a specific alias (for example, an email address or nickname on a social network). Usually, you will not know about such attention to your own person, because it does not lead to negative consequences.
But a fraudulent goal just causes such bad consequences – suddenly you can find out that someone has stolen money from your bank card or electronic account. And the only thing the attacker initially knew was the IP address.
What can I find out by IP?
Today it is enough just to find out information about the owner of the IP. This, without exaggeration, is within everyone's power, one has only to use an online service that provides whois data.

With the help of such sites, you can get the name of the person to whom this IP has been issued, his e-mail, and in some cases even a phone and a physical address. A little more complicated, but it is quite possible to "spy" which ports are open on a device with this IP (if the owner of the address is online). This is done by special port scanners that can show other information about the computer and the user.

Thus, thanks to the IP, you can find out about the user the data listed above. It would seem that it is not enough? Not at all. Internet access is provided by providers who, when connecting services, will definitely require your passport data. At the same time, information about IP connections and addresses is stored by the provider for a long time and can be provided by a court decision. So, it is quite realistic to compare the IP address issued at a certain time with the registration data and find a person.

Such facts lead us to the idea of the need for online anonymity.

Why be anonymous on the Internet?
With anonymity, the user gets the ability to bypass network censorship. You don't have to think about which website the deputies will ban tomorrow or whether it is possible to "go" to the forum on your network affairs without further interference in your personal life.

Anonymity makes an ordinary user beyond the control of government agencies, and they can cause a lot of trouble - up to direct costs of time, health and money. By remaining "open" on the Internet, you give the opportunity to bad personalities to "annoy" you. Such risks are easier to offset by technical means.

Most surveys show that the means of anonymity are used for banal purposes of circumventing censorship (state or corporate), out of paranoia or out of principle. Do not forget that someone is not always looking for you for the purpose of hacking and deception: it is quite possible that the activity on the Internet is controlled by the employer.

And advertising? The more real data a user leaves online, the more targeted advertising and outright spam they will receive in the future.

So, we realized that it is desirable to be anonymous online. What methods, paid and free, do exist for this? Let's look at them briefly.

Methods of anonymity
Proxy servers
To put it simply, a proxy is an intermediary between you and the site. That is, all requests entered on the network will be forwarded first to a specific server, and then it sends them to the requested site. Proxies provide IP address concealment and can block cookies, restrict downloaded content or encrypt data transmitted over the network. Free proxies (HTTP proxies, they are also web proxies) offer just such a set of functionality, while their more advanced counterparts (SOCKS proxies) boast of more sophisticated methods of anonymity. Separately in this paragraph we will mention "anonymizers", which are a web server with an input form where the user enters the address of the desired site. At the same time, the address of the parent server is displayed in the browser's address bar.

The disadvantages of proxy servers include the requirement of a separate configuration for each browser or program. Also, a proxy can cause information leakage without ensuring the confidentiality of data transfer between the user and the end site. In this regard, it is not recommended to use accounts and passwords that are significant to you when working through a proxy.

I2P
Invisible Internet Project is an anonymous and decentralized network, which is a bundle of data tunnels and works "on top" of the Internet. This network does not use IP addresses, and it has its own websites and other Internet services. Such closeness is the main disadvantage of I2P. The advantage of this network is end-to-end encryption between the user and the final destination.

TOR
The Onion Router is a network of routers and software for them, in which the user's browser accesses the Internet through a chain of nodes. When using this technology, your data and responses to them go through proxy servers (usually three), each of which does not know the addresses of the client and the addressee. Therefore, it is almost impossible to calculate the user's real address.

Installing TOR is quite simple – there is already a special assembly of the Internet browser, it is called the Tor Browser Bundle. The main disadvantage of this anonymization method is the low data transfer rate.

VPN services
Virtual Private Network is a service that changes IP and creates an encrypted and untraceable channel between the user and the network. This is the main difference between a VPN and a proxy - VPN encrypts the transmitted data. The best VPN providers will definitely change your DNS along with the IP in order to reliably hide your geographical location. We recommend that you choose a VPN that works in the OpenVPN protocol – now it is the best in terms of speed and connection security. Those users who need an increased level of anonymity choose DoubleVPN – this program consistently sends traffic through two different VPN servers. Be careful with free VPN services, as they often sell customer data, be sure to check whether the provider you have chosen does not save connection logs.

Note that most of the "anonymity programs" and browser extensions use proxies and VPN servers

Conclusions
Summarizing the article, we can give our readers the following tips:

- Disable all third-party plugins when using a standard browser;

- Disable the use of cookies, history and caching in the browser;

- To achieve maximum efficiency, use a "clean" and fully updated operating system;

- In anonymity mode, do not enter sites that deanonymize you (for example, social networks or public services);

- Do not use unverified applications;

- When surfing through open Internet points, do not use personal data, as well as data of your funds;

- Use only proven VPN services.

In conclusion, I would like to say that technical means are only a small component of anonymity on the Internet. However, the anonymity methods listed in the article are quite enough to significantly complicate the task for potential detractors.