Statisticians track each of your movements on the web. This is about surfing and buying habits, media usage, search terms, or behavior in computer games. Some users are annoyed with the idea that someone is constantly looking over their shoulders. Others see this as being easy, among other things because the monitoring does not have any noticeable disadvantages in everyday life. On the contrary, site-based services or services such as Google Now, Siri, or Cortana promise us more convenience with tailor-made information.
Quite simply anonymous with
But do not be fooled. Security experts like Vitaly Shmatikov have shown that a user can only be identified (deanonymized) with user profiles, assuming appropriate skill. He himself has demonstrated this with anonymous film assessments at Netflix. It also revealed very private details such as a preference for homoerotic films.
Number plate on the web
Users who leave user profiles behind several services are particularly vulnerable. Deanonymization works by linking data from different sources and drawing the right conclusions.
Stop Tracker
Be that as it may - the sensitivities are different in terms of data protection. The one rejects records as unethical, the other publishes worry-freely private pictures illustrated with photos in social networks.
Use Anonymous Mode
No matter how you think about privacy. You should at least make an informed decision when it comes to sharing data and think about what data you leave to whom. Businesses like Google or Facebook are powerful because you have a lot of websites and users on the web, apps and like buttons. Do not you believe? Install the Lightbeam plugin in the Firefox browser. It shows you graphically or in tabular form, who can listen to everything when visiting a website. Impressed? Now, check out the tools - PET (Privacy Enhancing Tools, programs that improve data protection) - with which you can get control of your data traces.
The easiest way to escape data collectors is to avoid their services. There are search engines without tracking such as Duckduckgo.com. Google's search engine Startpage.com provides search queries to Google and protects your user data. How to get Google results without sacrificing your identity.
Lesetipp: The best Google alternatives
There are also plenty of e-mail providers who promise their users anonymity. But sometimes you can or do not want to do without certain services such as Youtube or Facebook. Then you have to use other means.
An important identifier for each user is their Internet Protocol (IP) address. Your IP address and the MAC address (Media Access Control) of your network hardware are almost the autocards you carry with you on the Internet. Even if IP addresses for the normal user are always given again, a website operator can read from the address, in which region of the earth your computer is. For example, the country locks in Youtube and other services work. The MAC address of your hardware is unique across the world.
A web proxy or a virtual private network (VPN) service such as SpyOFF can obscure both. A site owner sees the address of the proxy or VPN server to which you are connected, but not that of your computer. As a result, these services are often used to avoid, for example, the Youtube and other US service locks.
From the use of one of the many free web proxies - just type proxy servers into any search engine - you can only advise against it. In most cases, you do not know which operators are actually behind these proxies and what interests they have. Just ask yourself how the proxy provider finances his offer. For paid VPN services, you do not have to ask this question.
With a VPN connection (also known as a tunnel), you can obfuscate your IP address and location. Nevertheless, you still get cookies and download web bugs and other tracker. This can be prevented with the right browser and the right add-ons. We choose Firefox because the manufacturer Mozilla is independent of companies like Google, Microsoft or Facebook. The prerequisite for anonymous browsing is, of course, that there are no add-ons installed in the browser that record your surfing behavior. You should also protect your PC with security software from adware.
For Firefox, there are some very good add-ons to protect privacy. Lightbeam we have already presented. Ghostery acts similarly. It shows the tracker found on a website. You can then block them specifically. Essential are the add-ons NoScript and Adblock Plus. Adblock Plus blocks advertising, and NoScript can selectively disable scripts from third-party vendors. Mostly you can use NoScript to disable all the annoying scripts and still keep the site functioning.
Flash cookies
All browsers now offer an anonymous surfing mode, incognito mode (Chrome), InPrivate Browsing (Edge), or Private Window. These modes are not intended to make you anonymous on the Web. They mainly serve to remove traces of a surf session on the local PC. Firefox goes a step further. Open a private window, Firefox uses a black list of the Disconnect.me tool to block web tracers. Under Extras / Settings / Data protection / Change blocking list, you can set whether you want to use the detailed list or the default list of moderate lists. If the "strict" list is used, some websites may not work.
Note: If you are using anonymous mode in your browser, your Internet service provider (ISP) can still track which pages you are calling. You can only protect yourself against a VPN connection before your ISP. Then it sees only the connection to the VPN provider. Everything else is encrypted.
Browser Dwindling
Another advantage of Firefox's private window is that at the end of a surfing session all the annoying cookies and locally stored files of the browser are deleted. The next time the browser is started, the tracker has disappeared. This does not necessarily apply to data that contains add-ons and plugins - a reason to make sure which plugins you install.
Even with private windows, you should configure the cookie settings correctly under Tools / Settings / Privacy. Accept third-party cookies should never stand. For Keep until select Firefox is closed. Also, clear the history when Firefox is closed. Under Settings, set a check mark in front of all elements. Now, Firefox will "forget" a lot of your surfing session - just like the sites you visited. By the way, the free tool CCleaner with the extension CCEnhancer helps you clean up the browser data.
Outside of the browser control are cookies which are deposited by the Adobe Flash Player. These must be switched off via the global settings of the player. To do so, open any site with Flash content. Click a video with the right mouse button and select Global Settings. Select the Prevent sites from storing information on this computer. Now you should not get any Flash cookies.
Really anonymous
Your browser tells a visited site from which other site you were referred (Referrer). If you want to hide this information, tell Firefox to suppress the referrer. Enter about: config in the address line. Now look for the term referer (so written!). Now you can set the value of network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0. But beware: Many sites do not work without referrers, so this option is not recommended. Instead try to set network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy to 1. Then the referrers are not passed on only if the site with the link and the called site come from different domains. If you switch to a different web provider, it does not get anything from the previous site.
You can also fake a wrong browser to the calling site. This is also about about: config, but for simplicity, you should use the Firefox Addon User Agent Switcher. With a wrong user agent, site operators do not notice which browser you are on the road - which can lead to incompatibility and misrepresented sites.
If you use a VPN network and use the tools presented here, you will miss most tracking attempts. But it is even better: technically savvy users set up their own proxy server to filter the sent data. Here is the free tool Privoxy, which runs on the same computer as your browser. This allows you to block advertising and tracking elements and determine what your browser is doing in the Web.
If you need anonymity at the intelligence level, you should use the gate network - a free VPN connection. Each request from your browser returns a random random path through a global network of gate machines. If it finally arrives at the target server - such as pc-magazin.de - you can probably no longer be tracked by outsiders. "Probably" means that there might be secret services like the NSA, who penetrate vulnerabilities in the gate network to de-user users. The technical possibilities available (for example the control of a large number of gate nodes) are a major topic of discussion among security specialists.
Through the Tor browser bundle (www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html) you can always enter the Tor network at any time. Unfortunately, Tor is also a playground for criminals with many doubtful sites. Therefore, we recommend that you do not use the client on a productive system to prevent infection with malware. Use your own platform instead. Here is the free Tails system, a Debian-based Linux system designed for anonymity. It runs without installation as a live DVD on your computer and comes with a pre-configured Tor client.
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