How Tor Can Help You Become More Anonymous Online
The internet is a lot, but for many of us, it’s far from private. By choosing the digital world, you’re often forced to give up your anonymity: trackers monitor your every move as you browse the web and scroll through social media, using this information to create profiles of your location (and where you’re located) and show you more relevant ads.
But this doesn’t have to be the case. There are a number of techniques that can help keep your internet browsing private. You can use a VPN to make it appear as if your internet activity is happening somewhere else; if you use Safari, you can use Private Relay to hide your IP address from the websites you visit; or you can connect to the internet through another network: Tor.
What is Tor?
The whole idea behind Tor (short for The Onion Router) is to anonymize your internet browsing so no one can detect that you’re visiting a specific website. Tor began as a project of the US Naval Research Laboratory in the 1990s , but became a non-profit organization in 2006. Since then, the network has become popular with users looking to privately access their web activity, whether they’re citizens of countries with strict censorship, journalists working on sensitive stories, or simply privacy-conscious individuals.
Tor is a network, but it’s often confused with the project’s official browser, also known as Tor Browser. Tor Browser is a modified version of Firefox that connects to the Tor network. The browser removes many technical barriers to accessing the Tor network: you can still visit URLs as you would in Chrome or Edge, but the browser automatically connects to them through the Tor network. But what does this mean?
How does Tor work?
Traditionally, when you visit a website, your data is sent directly to that site, along with your identifying information (i.e., your device’s IP address). That site, your internet service provider, and any other organizations with access to your internet traffic can detect that the request is coming from your device and collect that information accordingly. This could be done by a site that’s benign (such as saving your data for your next visit) or fraudulent (such as tracking you across the internet).
Tor changes the game in this internet browsing model. Instead of connecting your device directly to the website you’re visiting, Tor routes your connection through a series of different servers called “nodes.” These nodes are maintained by volunteers around the world, so it’s impossible to predict which nodes your request will pass through when establishing a connection.
But Tor wouldn’t be known for its privacy if it relied on just a few nodes to route your traffic. Beyond nodes, Tor adds layers of encryption to your request. As a request passes from one node to another, each node can decrypt only one layer of encryption , enough to know where to send the next request. This method ensures that no node in the system knows too much: each node only knows where the request came from in the previous step and where it’s sending the request in the next step. It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion, hence the platform’s name.
Here’s a simplified example of how it works : suppose you want to visit Lifehacker.com through Tor. You initiate the request as usual by typing the URL into Tor’s address bar and pressing Enter. When you do this, Tor adds multiple layers of encryption to your request. The first node it sends the request to, perhaps located in the US, can unlock one layer of this encryption, which tells the node which node to send it to next. The next node, perhaps located in Japan, decrypts another layer of this encryption, which tells it to send the request to a third node in Germany. This third node (known as the exit node) decrypts the final layer of encryption, which tells the node to connect to Lifehacker.com. Once Lifehacker receives the request, the reverse process occurs: Lifehacker sends the request to a node in Germany, which adds its own layer of encryption. It then sends it back to a node in Japan, which adds a second layer of encryption. It sends it back to a node in the US, which adds a final layer of encryption before the fully encrypted request is sent back to your browser, which can decrypt it entirely on your behalf. Congratulations: you’ve just visited Lifehacker.com without revealing your identity.
Tor isn’t perfect for privacy.
While Tor provides significant anonymity for your online activity, it doesn’t provide complete protection. One of the network’s most vulnerable points is the exit node: since the last node in the chain transmits the decrypted request, it can see where you’re going and possibly what you do once you arrive. It won’t be able to determine where the request originated, but it will be able to see that you’re trying to access Lifehacker. Depending on the websites you visit, you could reveal enough information to expose yourself.
This was especially true when websites primarily used the unencrypted HTTP protocol. If you connected to an unencrypted website, that endpoint could see your activity on the site itself, including login information, messages, or financial data. But now that most sites have migrated to the encrypted HTTPS protocol, concerns about third parties accessing the contents of your traffic have diminished. Nevertheless, even if trackers can’t see what you do or say on these sites, they can see that you visited the site itself, so Tor remains useful on today’s encrypted internet.
Who should use Tor?
If you’ve heard of Tor, you might know it as the primary service for accessing the darknet . That’s true, but that doesn’t make Tor bad. The darknet itself isn’t bad: it’s simply a network of websites that aren’t accessible through standard web browsers. Of course, it includes some very bad websites full of very bad content. But it also encompasses a range of perfectly legal activities . Chrome and Firefox don’t see the darknet, but the Tor browser does.
But you don’t have to visit the dark web for Tor to be useful. Anyone who wants to keep their internet traffic private from the outside world can benefit from it. You might have a pressing need to do so, for example, if you live in a country where access to certain websites is restricted, or if you’re a reporter working on a story whose leak could have serious consequences. But you don’t have to have special circumstances to use Tor. Tor can help reduce anyone’s digital footprint and prevent online surveillance.
One big drawback
If you do decide to use Tor, be aware that it won’t be as fast as other modern browsers. Passing your traffic through several international nodes reduces performance, so you may have to wait longer than usual for websites to load. However, it’s easy to give it a try, as it’s free to download and use on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Android. (Sorry, iOS users.) If you’re worried about what you’ve heard about the dark web, don’t worry: the only way to access this content is to search for it directly. Otherwise, Tor will work just like any other browser, if only a little slower.