Link and download privacy
VPNS AND TOR ARE THE KEYS TO KEEPING YOUR GENERAL ONLINE ACTIVITIES PRIVATE.
WHEN IT COMES to privacy, encryption alone is not enough. If you send an encrypted email, it may be the case that nobody can read its contents, but the fact that you sent an email and to whom is still recorded. An encrypted connection to a website or peer-to-peer service doesn’t hide the fact that you visited it or used it — your ISP still knows that your IP address connected to the IP address of the website or service. And when you visit a website, that site gets to record your IP address, so even if you don’t hand over any information to them, they still can potentially track you.
is is where link privacy comes in. ese are tools that protect your IP address from being revealed to the services you use and prevent network providers and hackers from detecting which sites you’re visiting. e most well known of such services are VPN services. A VPN service creates an encrypted link between you and their server. All your incoming and outgoing tra c goes through that link, routing through the VPN server rather than directly to the destination. at has an important privacy implication: your ISP can only see you connecting to the VPN provider and no-one else. Your outgoing IP connections will always be to one place — the VPN provider. Your incoming IP connections will always appear to be from the VPN provider. Likewise, a VPN anonymises your IP address. When you connect to a website or any internet service, your IP address will appear to be the IP address of the VPN provider rather than your real IP address.
is is how VPNs foil geoblocking — they make it appear as though your IP address is from another country.
ere is another important security and privacy element to VPNs, too. All the data in between you and the VPN server is encrypted, so it hides both the content and the destination of any data you send. is is important for more than just hiding your activity from snoopy ISPs and governments — it’s a crucial security tool on public Wi-Fi hotspots. Nominally, anybody on the same Wi-Fi network as you can ‘listen in’ on your Wi-Fi transmissions. A VPN stops that from happening.
We should note, however, that a VPN connection is not end-to-end encrypted. e link between you and the VPN provider is; however, the nal leg between the provider and the destination site is not, so anybody listening in on the ‘far side’ of the VPN link could still potentially grab your data. at’s why browser security and HTTPS is so important, and we’ll get to that in a bit. Obviously we’ve covered VPNs extensively in
TechLife, and we won’t reiterate all of that here. But we will point you to a number of free VPN services. If you’re not interested in subscribing to a full paid VPN service, you should at least create an account with a free service. Most free services are speed- or volume-limited (so they’re no good for Net ixing, for example), but they’re still useful if you just want to send the occasional sensitive missive or don’t want your use of a particular service monitored.
A VPN SERVICE CREATES AN ENCRYPTED LINK BETWEEN YOU AND THEIR SERVER. ALL YOUR INCOMING AND OUTGOING TRAFFIC GOES THROUGH THAT LINK, ROUTING THROUGH THE VPN SERVER RATHER THAN DIRECTLY TO THE DESTINATION.
VPNS AND TRUST
VPNS AREN’T A CURE ALL. IN LARGE PART, THEY SIMPLY SHIFT THE TRUST FROM YOUR ISP TO THE VPN PROVIDER. Your ISP can no longer see what sites you’re visiting, but your VPN provider can. Because their business relies on it, most VPNs are good about this — the best ones don’t keep any logs or records of your activity and so cannot hand over such information even if government agencies demand it.
In some countries, this is changing. Private Internet Access, for example, just pulled out of Russia because the Russian Government started demanding that VPN providers keep connection records like ISPs do. In Australia and US, however, VPN providers are not governed by the same metadata retention rules that ISPs are.
If you’re considering a VPN provider and you’re wondering how the one you’re looking at shapes up, we strongly recommend visiting
It’s the most comprehensive look at VPN privacy policies we’ve seen.
TOR AND ORBOT
As we mentioned above, a VPN service really just shifts the trust from your ISP to the VPN service provider. If you really want no-one to know what you’re doing online, Tor is a better solution, though it’s probably not for everyone.
Tor is a system that bounces tra c between multiple PCs owned by other Tor users before heading to its destination. Nobody, not even you, knows the complete route your tra c will take to get to its destination. Each link in the chain only knows the previous and next steps, and the originating IP address is completely obscured by the time your data exits the Tor network. The link is encrypted, so nobody can intercept the data while it travels across Tor (though, as with VPNs, it can be intercepted once it leaves Tor — which, again, is why browser security is so important).
Although it sounds quite technical, most of the Tor stu happens in the background. Tor itself is very easy to use. It’s really just like any other web browser. Just follow these steps:
Head to and download the Tor Browser, then install it and run it.
For most users, in the Tor Network Settings page you can just click ‘Connect’.
There will be a relatively brief connection dialogue while it nds a node on Tor to connect to, then the browser will appear. You can then just use the browser like you normally would. The Tor browser is based on Mozilla, and it’s precon gured for high security.
If you’re on an Android mobile and you’d like to use Tor, you can. In this case, the app you need is called Orbot, and it will route either your web browsing or all your internet tra c across Tor. You can grab it from Google Play. Just install it and tap on ‘Browser’ to re up a web browser running Orbot in the background. If you tap on ‘VPN’, you can con gure Orbot to send all your data from all your apps through Tor.
Tor and Orbot do have one major downside: speed. Because it’s being routed through other users, data has to travel a lot further. It can also only go as fast as the slowest link in the chain. Which is to say, don’t expect to stream video over Tor. Its primary purpose is to pass censorship and access sites anonymously.