Tor and Its Limits Tor and Its LimitsThere are two general categories of bad actors that want to infringe on the privacy of the web: - malicious governments with access to ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and mega corporations that run social and advertising networks. - TOR (The Onion Router) is useful in protecting privacy from malicious governments (which spy on traffic in transit) but not from mega corporations (which embed malicious code on web servers).
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Malicious GovernmentsMalicious governments often spy on their citizens to punish dissent or human rights activity. - They commonly either operate the local ISPs or they can force them to disclose information showing every IP address that is visited by each user. - Tor is designed to defeat this infringement of privacy by encrypting the traffic from a userâs device and routing it through three separate servers on the internet - before sending it on to the final destination. - This means that no individual ISP, server, or website, can know both the IP address the userâs device and the IP address of the final web server. - Malicious governments and the ISPs they control cannot tell which web servers a user is accessing, although they can tell that the user is using Tor. - In some parts of the world, using Tor could be construed as an evidence of illegal behavior (âif you didnât have anything to hide you wouldnât be encrypting your trafficâ) - and users could be punished because governments assume they are doing something that is prohibited. Thus, Tor can be helpful, but isnât a panacea.
- - - Mega CorporationsWhen a user connects to a web server, the web server can see the userâs IP address. - Although it isnât a perfect science, IP addresses can be turned into physical addresses with a fair amount of accuracy. - Small web servers typically rely on IP addresses to identify the location of the users visiting their site. Tor is a good solution to mask the userâs location from these servers. - But large mega corporations that own social media and advertising networks use a whole profile of information that is designed to track users across devices and IP addresses. - These profiles employ a variety of techniques to identify users, including JavaScript, cookies, tracking IDs, and browser fingerprinting. - Because the vast majority of the websites on the internet either load an ad from one of the major networks or embed social media icons with their associated JavaScript, - these corporations have built profiles for almost every user online and can track their internet activity across unrelated sites.
- -They track every site that is visited, everything that is purchased, every credit card that is used to make a purchase, every address that items are shipped to, - and the GPS metadata of every picture that is uploaded to the internet. - They build a profile of a userâs age, gender, marital status, address, political affiliations, religious affiliations, family circumstances, number of pets, - and everything else they can get their hands on. - They even buy up databases of credit card transactions at local stores, so they can track the off-line purchasing patterns of the users in their profiles. - Because they already have much more accurate address information about a user than an IP address discloses, Tor provides no real privacy protection against mega corporations.
- -The single best privacy protection against mega corporations is to browse the web with JavaScript disabled, followed by blocking ad networks, disabling cookies and DOM storage, - and using a browser that is difficult to fingerprint.
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Using TorDespite its limitations, Tor can be useful in some circumstances. - The Tor project has an app for Android called Orbot, which is available on F-Droid - and everywhere else that Privacy Browser is distributed. Privacy Browser has a setting to use Orbot as a proxy. - When this is turned on, Privacy Browserâs app bar will have a light blue background instead of the default light grey. - When Privacy Browserâs Orbot proxy setting is enabled, internet access will not work unless Orbot is running and connected to Tor. - Because traffic is being routed through several Tor nodes, using Tor is often much slower than connecting directly to the internet.
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Downloading Files Via TorWhen Orbot is operating in proxy mode, browsing the internet using Privacy Browser will be routed through the Tor network, but file downloads will not. - This is because Privacy Browser uses Androidâs builtin download manager to download files, which doesn't have a proxy option. - Users who want to download files via Orbot need to enable its VPN mode.
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