If you’re a member of the Tin Foil Hat club (even if just a part-time member), privacy matters to you, so here are 5 tools that should keep the po po‘s from kicking in your door.
1. Tor
Link: https://www.torproject.org/
Tor is a way of browsing the internet anonymously.
I tried out Tor before, and I find the best way to run a Tor browser is portable-style where it keeps all its settings self-contained, so to speak. Yes, you can run it in other ways, but the pre-made portable Firefox with Tor included works out nicely; this is especially good to have if you already have Firefox installed on your PC, because the portable version allows you to run the Tor’d Firefox completely separate. Or to put it another way, one Firefox won’t mess with the other.
Do you use Tor? If so, what’s your preferred way of running it?
2. StartPage
Link: https://startpage.com
This is a search engine and is billed as the most private there is.
I’ve mentioned StartPage before, and this is what I personally use for all my searching. Is it for the privacy? No. I use StartPage because it allows me to make Google searches without Google shoving all their social crapola at me.
3. anony
Link: https://anony.ws/
This is an anonymous image hosting website.
While true you can post images to Minus or Imgur for fast, no-account-required image sharing, when anonymity matters, anony is better if for no other reason it has HTTPS security.
4. Hushmail
Link: http://www.hushmail.com/
This is an email service.
Hushmail has a lot of tenure on the internet and is one of the very few webmail services that actually does security right, because you can encrypt any mail you send directly from the compose screen with a simple check of a box.
In addition, Hushmail is for all intents and purposes completely "snoop proof".
5. Bitwise IM Personal
Link: http://www.bitwiseim.com/
This is an instant messaging service.
Bitwise allows you to use instant messaging that’s encrypted. The personal edition is free, and is cross-platform compliant to work in Windows, Mac or Linux. It’s also nice that the client software is very small, very fast and very easy to use.
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Anonymous browsing does not come without cost – it is noticeably slower in my experience. So that question is whether it is worth it. No doubt in some, probably very specific cases it might be of use, generally it is not such a great thing.
Going anonymous may, ironically, be also counterproductive since it sticks out in web traffic. Some time ago (a couple of years back?) German police collected quite a few of those guys providing Tor hosting servers, if memory serves right.
one more tool
http://www.stayinvisible.com
Anony is not anonymous, you might as well use Photobucket instead of Anony, there is nothing there making you anonymous, your IP is recorded.