How to stay anonymous online: 5 top tips

Want to know how to stay anonymous online? What are the best ways to stay anonymous online and
how can you keep snooping eyes off your online activities?
The world was abruptly woken to the fact of NSA’s mass surveillance of internet traffic thanks to Edward Snowden, and ever since that revelation more and more people around the world have expressed their concerns, frustrations and anger against this extreme, invasive spying technique.
But what are the best ways to help you stay anonymous online? Fortunately, there are many services and apps that will help you to stay secure online and allow you to surf the internet anonymously – stopping eyes from snooping on your online activities!

When the Snowden documents were released, it was revealed that the NSA had difficulty in cracking a number of services which offer encryption. Amongst these revelations was the NSA term “Level 5 catastrophic” which means that the NSA can’t break the encryption – yet!  his is a combination of CSpace, Tor and ZRTP and a anonymizing piece of technology like a VPN, meaning the NSA has “near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications,” according to Der Spiegel.

How to stay anonymous online – 5 tips to surf anonymously and stay anonymous online

1. Virtual Private Network (VPN)
Use a VPN and you’re in great company with millions of other security-conscious people around the world. When you connect to a VPN server, all of your traffic is encrypted, meaning anyone ‘listening in’ will be unable to decrypt or view data being sent, other than a string of meaningless characters. It’s a great piece of technology which will allow you surf anonymously, and stay anonymous online.

2. Dropbox
Now if Edward Snowden says “get rid of Dropbox” (he called the cloud storage system “hostile to privacy”), then I think that’s a good enough reason not to use it. If you do need to share files, try Spideroak which Snowden recommends.

3. Javascript
JavaScript is widely used across the web as its functionality allows the user to interact with websites in a fairly complex way. Use online banking? Facebook? or Google search? It’s a good bet there’s some Javascript running there somewhere. The problem is not with Javascript itself, but how attackers can hijack vulnerabilities in the browser and get Javascript code to do things it’s not meant to, like send you off to a malicious website and install malware and keyloggers. While disabling Javascript completely could be argued as the best option for the security-conscious, it does reduce the level of internet functionally available to the user.  A compromise would be to install NoScript which allows you to disable any running scripts (Java, Flash, etc.) on websites you don’t trust, and whitelist the ones you do. While this won’t encrypt your data, it will potentially stop any harmful code running on your computer.

4. Incognito mode
We recently explained how to use incognito mode on Safari, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. Using incognito mode and clearing cached browsing data stops websites from being able to track you, to an extent. When you use incognito mode your browser, for example Safari, will not store cookies or temporary internet files, and so while this feature will not make you anonymous or encrypt your data, it will help to stop a casual observer from finding out what you’ve been up to online.

5. CSpace
While most people may use Facebook chat or Skype to communicate with friends, it’s long been known that these services can be, and are, intercepted on a regular basis. A more secure service is CSpace, which is an open-source encrypted chat service which allows people to communicate safely and securely, as well as transfer files.
Staying anonymous online isn’t hard to achieve – look out for our next 5 tips on how to stay anonymous online!

More information about HMA! Pro VPN can be found on our website.

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