When we travel around the cyber world, we end up leaving
behind a lot of footprints. These originate not only from our comments on Facebook
or tweets on twitter. There are a whole
lot of ways how websites tend to track us. We may not like it but websites know
our exact location, habit, gender and a host of information of our system.
Although these information may be harmless but in the hands
of a hacker or a snoopy government, they may cause harm. For these reasons many
of us don’t like these information to be leaked out. Anonymity is especially
needed by activists to keep their tracks clean from oppressive regimes and to
get around censorship.
As there is variety of ways to get information on the
netizens, there are also a number of ways to hide ones identity and maintain anonymity.
The browser settings
are mostly ineffective as they merely don’t record the history of web surfing
in the own computer, but it does not stop external factors from recording all
the digital footsteps.
The VPNs and Proxy servers are also ineffective as most of
them store a data, and under a court order or pressure from governments, they does
not have any other option but to turn over the data to the law enforcement
agencies.
The best way to maintain anonymity is to use a service call
TOR, which comes with its own set browser. Research has proved that till now
even the mighty NSA is unable to penetrate the TOR network with complete ease.
TOR stands for “The Onion Network”, which is a virtual
circuit with onion like layers. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free,
worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than 7 thousand relays to
conceal a user's location or usage from snoopy governments or censorship
firewalls. Tor encrypts the original data multiple times. This encrypted data
contains destination IP address. Then it is send through a virtual circuit
comprising successive, randomly selected Tor relays. Each relay only decrypts upto
a certain layer of encryption only to reveal the next relay in the circuit in
order to pass the remaining encrypted data on to it. The final relay decrypts
the innermost layer of encryption and sends the original data to its
destination without revealing, or even knowing, the source IP address. As the
routing of the communication is bounced through every hop in the Tor circuit, it
eliminates any single point at which the communication can be de-anonymized
through network surveillance.
There is no direct way to defeat the anonymity of TOR, for
this reason a top secret NSA document has revealed that it has been described as
"the King of high secure, low latency Internet anonymity" with
"no contenders for the throne in waiting".
