Extra Privacy While Browsing

When browsing the Internet it is important to some people to have some sense of privacy. To achive this privacy there are various different ways of doing this. Each of these have plus and minuses.



Here are a short list of options to stay private on the web.

• VPN
• Tor
• Proxy

Depending on your work environment some of these may be against your companies policies and may get you reprimanded by your IT department. 

VPN

There have been a lot of VPN services starting up in these previous years. People are flocking to European VPN services since Europe has stricter privacy laws than the United States does. People that are going to these services don't want their web surfing tracked by their government, ISPs, corporations,  and much more.  Some advantages to using a VPN are that they are generally fast. The downside are that they generally cost money for a good connection to the internet. So if your planning to use it with bittorrent or downloading in other means. Then it may cost you some monthly fees. 

A good list of VPNs that are up front about what they track on their users can be found here. 

TOR
The tor project is all about anonymity. This is a great free and portable way to have privacy on the go and with changing IP addresses so that your company can't block it. This service is great because it is free. Though there are downsides to this just like proxies the service can go slow and it can have rouge nodes. Never try to use bittorrent or download large files on this network as it very slow and it slows down everyone else.

Proxy
Proxies are servers that will redirect internet traffic. There are free services out there like proxy.org. There are also christian based proxies too (Google Search). Though just like Tor network you need to watch out for some free services as they may be tracking you and also some rouge servers. Proxy servers are not always the fastest of the bunch. You are generally not able to make POST on some of them. This means you can't lot into some services online. Making them not suitable for some type of web surfing. Though this is not the case for all proxies. A lot of companies use proxies on their companies servers to easily filter and protect users and where they are going online.


I hope this helps you make a more informed decision on how to best protect your privacy online. There are other methods on top of these services to help protect you in other ways. No Script, adblock, don't follow, and Reading TOS are a few of other methods of protecting your privacy.

Thanks for Reading,
Local Tech Repair Admin