When you surf, you leave many different traces. For example, servers and web services store information about you in cookies and super-cookies. The more often you use a provider’s service, the more accurate their picture of you becomes. And the better the providers are networked with each other, the more information they have at their disposal to create surfing profiles.
Take Amazon, for example. The web giant suggests articles to you based on previous searches. Your purchasing behavior or product research is always recorded and analyzed. This means you receive purchase suggestions in the form of advertising banners for products that you have previously searched for on another site. The data collection mania of web services can also be disadvantageous for you when it comes to dynamic pricing. The product price adapts to demand. This can mean that you end up paying a higher price.
Data slinger IP address
The biggest traitors are your browser and your IP address. The latter is automatically given when you surf so that the server with the website knows where to send its data. This is necessary, but anyone can use the IP address to find out at least your approximate location. We therefore present various ways in which you can surf the Internet as anonymously as possible.
Analyzing your IP address is only one of several identifiers that can be used to track you on the Internet. However, your IP address is the most important common feature that website operators and advertising providers can access. This is why IP address protection requires special attention when it comes to improving your privacy. This is where a virtual machine can be very useful.
The VM helps you to simply surf the net using a cloak of invisibility whenever you want to be as unrecognized as possible – for example when shopping online, searching for information or accessing private content. For everyday page views such as visiting news sites, streaming music and films, you don’t usually need the protective shield. You can carry out these activities without the VM on your host PC.
Disguise the VM’s online data traffic with a VPN
VPN providers such as Windscribe not only allow the use of an encrypted VPN connection, but also make it possible to bypass geo-IP blocks with corresponding servers.
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A tried and tested means of travelling on the internet reasonably undetected is via a VPN tunnel (Virtual Private Network). Here, the data packets are not sent directly from your virtual machine to the target server, but are routed via a VPN server.
The advantage is that the log files of the servers visited do not store your IP address, but that of the VPN server. In addition, the data sent via a VPN tunnel is also encrypted, which makes it more difficult for third parties to intercept it.
To access the Internet with a stealth connection, all you need to do is install the software provided by the provider in the VM. We recommend the VPN services from Nord VPN, Cyberghost, and Surfshark. Windscribe is free with a volume of 10 GB per month.
VPN providers usually not only enable IP masking, but also the circumvention of geo-IP blocks. Such measures are intended to prevent users from certain countries from using services — usually video streaming — that are either not available or only available to a limited extent in their countries.
However, if you go online with your IP address, which identifies you as a user from Germany via a VPN server with a US IP address, you are considered an American for the target server.
More privacy when surfing
If the IP address of the PC is changed and disguised, you are not only cheating the advertising industry. Instead of one visitor accessing ten pages, you will appear in the server’s log files as ten visitors who have each accessed one page. The Tor Browser, which connects to the Tor network, is recommended for this. It disguises the actual IP address through intermediate proxy servers.
The packets no longer take the shortest route from you to their destination, but go via intermediate stations. The Tor node to which you are connected knows your IP address, the second and third nodes no longer do, and certainly not the destination server. The Tor network is structured in such a way that each intermediate station only knows the IP address of its predecessor. This makes it difficult to trace the sender of a packet.
Tor also has disadvantages. Depending on utilization, the surfing speed becomes significantly slower. Even an overloaded intermediate station can slow things down. And as with all networks, it can only be so secure as long as it is not compromised. After all, if surveillance agencies manage to spy on a Tor node, it is not possible to de-anonymize a user.
Secure and anonymous with Tails
Tails is a live Linux system based on Debian that places particular emphasis on privacy and anonymity. To this end, Tails has the aforementioned, particularly secure Tor browser. In addition, there are other programs such as the e-mail client Thunderbird, the messenger Pidgin, the graphics programs Gimp, and Inkscape as well as the office package Libre Office.
Three versions of Tails are available for download on the manufacturer’s website https://tails.net/. You can choose between a USB image for later use on USB data carriers, an ISO image for burning to DVD, and an ISO image for use in a virtual machine from Virtualbox or Vmware Workstation or Player.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.