Online privacy is essential, and everyone must understand the risk involved if you don’t protect yourself by staying anonymous. We fear hackers, malware, or third-parties who want to sneak into our digital activities and prevent cybercrimes from exploiting. Your ISP may keep logs on all your digital footprints too.
If you live under the Five Eyes countries, then let’s add government surveillance prying all your digital activities. That is why internet privacy is essential, and keeping anonymous should be your top priority even if there are no illegal activities related to you.
Luckily, there are effective ways to stay anonymous online. For an average internet user: browsing, surfing, playing online games, sharing files, or shopping doesn’t offer invisibility. Though it’s significantly more challenging than it was, there are five effective ways to be digitally anonymous, anytime and anywhere.
5 Tips on How To Stay Anonymous Online
To stay anonymous online means, you need to hide your digital activities, blend in the crowd, or hide IP addresses to protect your privacy. Using software as a virtual private network is a highly useful tool.
Free VPN’s are a no-no. Regardless of how they promise to protect your identity, they won’t. They keep logs of all your digital footprints. You can check this list of recommended VPN for anonymity, as they provide robust encryption that even hackers or government surveillance will have a hard time tracking your activities.
- Hide/Masked Your Location And IP Address
There are three ways to stay anonymous and hide your IP address while running errands online—using a proxy, VPN, or TOR. Using a proxy does the same as using a VPN. However, there are more features a VPN can provide compared to the proxy.
Using a virtual private network is like using an encrypted tunnel to the system. These servers allow you to hide your real IP address making it hard for anyone to track your location or trace your identity.
The Onion Router (TOR) provides security and privacy while connected to the internet. Using this software is like going into a myriad of random tunnels from different proxies, which improved your internet privacy.
Among these three options, using a reliable and trustworthy VPN is the most effective way to hide your identity.
- Avoid Popular Search Engines
Popular search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and Google can expertly identify your current location to provide focus ads based on your online activities. Logging under this search engine enables them to track your device information, device location, cookie data, and IP address.
- Browse Privately
Privately browsing keeps all your internet activity anonymous. When you browse on different websites, you’re leaving cookies, and these are stored on the device that you use. With this, other websites can check on these cookies (prints) to provide a custom-fit experience you might be interested in.
When you browse privately or using Incognito (Google), your browsing history won’t be stored, thus keeping anonymity online.
- Use Anonymous Communication And Email
While using tools to mask your IP address, sending or using personal email is another story. There are two effective ways to hide your real email address but come with tons of spamming emails.
Using an alias is the first one. It helps you hide your real email address from everyone but can spam your inbox too. Next is using a disposable account. It can be used for a specific time, as long as you need it.
- Avoid Connecting To Public WiFi
Free WiFi from hotels, cafes, airports, and other commercial establishments is tempting. Most of the time, people will just connect their devices without understanding the risk associated with it. Public connections are risky as hackers get an excellent place to dig deeper into your activity logs.
If you need to connect to a public WiFi, using a high-quality VPN will keep your identity and mask all your activities for complete security.
What Does It Mean Being Anonymous Online?
Being anonymous online means all your interactions are protected, your identity is secured, and no one can spy or track your information. You can have peace of mind browsing and doing all your internet activities without compromising your privacy.
Conclusion
The bottom line is, you need to be cautious of what you do online by ensuring all your sensitive data is protected from spies, hackers, surveillance, or third-party’s. It’s possible to be anonymous in the digital world. All you have to do is follow these tips, and you’re doing yourself a great favor when it comes to digital privacy.