Easy When You Know How
After realising she’s not the only person using her Amazon account, Jane Hoskyn decides it’s time to…
Jane Hoskyn installs Tor to test how private it really is
Someone broke into my Amazon account, and it’s made me a bit paranoid. A mystery shopper changed my address, upgraded my account to Prime, and used my payment details to buy make-up brushes. I don’t wear make-up (it makes me look like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane), but my hacker clearly wanted the very best face-caking tools for 2019. At my expense.
I promptly locked down my account, and the lipstick larcenist has not resurfaced. But I was nervous about shopping again without an additional layer of security. VPNS (virtual private networks) are an option, but whenever I’ve tried them they’ve slowed down my connection and demanded payment to continue using them. So I thought I’d give the open-source alternative Tor (‘the onion router’) a go instead.
Tor’s browser ( www.snipca.com/30126) is completely anonymous. If your usual browser’s Incognito mode fell into a vat of chemicals and emerged as a superhero wearing an invisibility cloak, it’d be Tor. Unlike VPNS, Tor isn’t interested in letting you watch the latest hit drama on US streaming websites. Its focus is entirely on privacy. And it’s completely free.
The browser is basically Firefox on the surface, with a private network underneath. It bounces your encrypted data through “relays” run by thousands of volunteers around the world, so no one can tell where or who you are. In the past, this made Tor even slower than VPNS, but new Tor 8 is based on Mozilla’s souped-up Quantum platform, so it promises speed as well as secrecy. Let’s see how true that is.
Installation was quick and easy, and I found the Firefox interface cosily familiar. But key Firefox elements, such as the glorious add-ons library, are missing. Tor regards extensions as security’s enemy, so it ditches them (except four pre-installed privacy tools), and doesn’t even let you download files. Torrents are completely banned, so bad luck if you’d hoped to use Tor to go Pirate Bay-diving with impunity.
I ran Chrome and Tor at the same time to compare their speed and privacy like for like. A search for ‘garden birds UK’ delivered results in less than half a second in Chrome, and three seconds in Tor’s default search engine Duckduckgo. Web pages opened rather slower in Tor, while videos and photos loaded much slower. But we’re not here to have fun, we’re here to browse in total privacy.
So I then opened Google Maps to find out how easily each browser could see where I was. In Chrome, it zoomed instantly into my house - even in Incognito mode when I wasn’t logged in. In Tor, it didn’t have the foggiest, dumping me in the sea near the Seychelles. Similarly, BBC Weather knew my location in Chrome, even in Incognito, but in Tor it hedged its bets with a big globe. At least it knew what planet I was on.
Then I went to What Is My IP? ( www. whatsmyip.org) and Privacy.net’s Privacy Analyzer ( https://privacy.net/analyzer). In Chrome (yep, Incognito included) they immediately identified my IP address, location, browser, operating system and internet service provider. In Tor they displayed a mystery IP address which, when pasted into the address bar (in both browsers for good measure), took me to a page about Tor (see screenshot above). So a determined snooper would see I was using Tor, but they wouldn’t be able to crack its shell. Indeed, even US and UK spy agencies have failed to crack Tor.
I’m impressed enough to make Tor my essential shopping companion, but it won’t become my default browser. I’m too wedded to the fun stuff. Besides, the constant logging in would drive me round the bend. You have to log in afresh every time you visit an account, and many sites demand extra verification in Tor because they don’t recognise the ‘device’. And because no cookies are stored, you’re battered with GDPR messages at every turn. Luckily, Tor is so private no one can hear you scream.
BBC Weather knew my location in Chrome, but in Tor it hedged its bets with a big globe. At least it knew what planet I was on