A lot of people do not necessary have important businesses to ask about how to stay anonymous online. You and I do not have to be a secret agent or bad hackers to care about how to stay anonymous online! We have many reasons to care about our security and privacy of our activities via the internet. Very soon, everything we do online will be logged, analyzed, and used for things out of our control, actually it’s already happened. But this doesn’t mean there are no ways to solve our problem “how to stay anonymous online”.
We will talk about how to stay anonymous online during browsing, communicating, downloading, catching up with your emails, etc.
There are three different stages or levels to keep your anonymity all your online time like the following.
Level 1: how to stay anonymous online while web browsing:
Of course the best way to stay anonymous during surfing the web is to hide your actual IP address. Knowing your IP address will facilitate tracing your activities online and knowing your location at least in addition more information about what you do online. Basically there are three ways to stay anonymous online:
- Using a proxy server:
If you care about all your activities to be secured and encrypted during surfing, hiding yourself in someone else is the best way to keep your anonymity. A proxy server routes all your traffics through different server. So no one can trace your activities easily. And to use proxy server, there are many ways to do that either using many free proxies online you can search it, or using the available extensions of most of web browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, or others.
- Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN):
You can hide your IP address via a VPN as well as proxy server does. A VPN is a virtual private network which uses your public network to connect required websites easily. So it’s a bit different from using proxy, but both of them achieve the same results. Anyone thinks you’re browsing via your actual IP address from America when you’re actually surfing from the UK. Get an unlimited VPN account here.
- Using TOR (The Onion Router):
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels helps people surfing and communicating safely to improve the privacy and security online. It’s similar to using a lot of proxies selected at random way and periodically. It’s a lot more than just a secure browser. If you care about using Tor to stay anonymous, check the official Tor websites.
Level 2: how to stay anonymous online during communication and emailing
Of course using either VPN or Tor or proxies will hide your actual IP address. But if you want to hide your email address while you’re sending an email. Generally speaking there are two methods help you doing this.
- Using an alias:
When you send mail via alias, the recipient will only see your forwarding address “alias” not your real email. This method will keep your real email address being secret, but will not keep you from being as a spammer.
- Using a disposable email account:
You can create a new email account with a fake name and use it until you finishing your needs. Or you can use a disposable email account. It’s about creating a temporary forwarding address that is deleted after a particular time. Using a disposable email will be very good for signing up for stuff on websites you don’t trust and keep your inbox from being full of spam emails.
How to stay anonymous online without using VPN progorams? Watch the video below:
Level 3: how to stay anonymous online during file transfer and sharing
While you are downloading files from the internet, especially via Bit Torrent, many peers can see your real IP address during downloading. You can use either a proxy server or VPN. Downloading and sharing files is one of the least anonymous things you can do of the web.
Now you know how to stay anonymous online with all of anonymity levels.
