Friday, June 23, 2017

9:36 AM

The Internet has become an integral part of our daily life. Most people spend a lot of their time surfing the web. However, whatever a person wishes to surf is out in the open for everyone to see. There is little privacy to behold for a user while accessing the internet. There could be numerous reasons why a person might want to browse the web anonymously. It could be to avoid targeted Google ads to crop up on your browsers or prevent the websites visited previously to appear in the browsing history. No matter the reasons, protecting your privacy online is a very tall order.

Top 8 Ways to Surf the Internet or Web Anonymously

Today, we are going to present you with full proof methods for surfing the web anonymously without leaving your history behind.

1. Using a Private Browser Window

One of the simplest of ways for surfing the web anonymously is using the Private Browsing Mode or the Incognito Mode of your web browser. It allows you to hide the history of websites you have previously visited. This browsing window comes handy in particular when you are using a shared or a public computer which others also have an access to. The incognito mode ensures that the third-party cookies are blocked from use and the first-party cookies are always deleted when you close the session.

2. Killing All Your Web-Browser Cookies

The web browser’s privacy setting options allow you to block or delete all third-party cookies which can help you to stop few forms of web tracking. However, you are still vulnerable to other forms of tracking due to the presence of Super-cookies or flash cookies which also store information about websites you visited. These cookies are created by websites that make use of the Flash player of your system. One very famous tool to get rid of Flash Cookies is CCleaner. You can download and install the CCleaner and run the application to get rid of these cookies which allow you to browse the web anonymously.

3. Prevent Your Browser from Sending Location Data

Most of the web browsers that are available on the internet have an inbuilt feature that allows them to send your geographical position and locations the websites you surf on the internet. These prevent you from surfing the web anonymously as they are done to make sure you get relevant search results but most times, websites and advertisers can also make use of this information to their advantage. In order to do so, you can deny the location requests for dodgy websites through the settings options of your web browser.

4. Anonymous Search

Next up on our article of how to browse the web anonymously, is to switch off Google’s personalized search option. Usually, whatever you search on the Internet through Google is linked to your account in order to provide you personalized search results. While these searches are highly relevant to us, most of the times they can also prevent you from viewing certain web pages. Therefore, in order to turn off Google’s personalized search option, head over to the Search Tools >> All Results >> Verbatim and turn off the option. You can also choose from a number of private search engines available on the internet such as the DuckDuckGo.

5. Prevent Google Tracking

Google has managed to form your profile on the basis of what you like and what you do line due to the plethora of apps and services such as Gmail, Google+, Search Bar and YouTube. The unified privacy policy of Google links all this information about you from various services to one single account and combine them to provide you with a personalized experience. However, this enables targeted ads to be showed on your computer screen based on the content you search online. To browse the web anonymously, you can opt out of this and turn off the ad personalization option.

6. Opt Out of Tracking

One of the important things you need to do to ensure that you are able to browse the web anonymously is to opt out of tracking on various websites. Most of the websites on the internet are preloaded with cookies that are able to track your geographical location. Usually, these cookies are embedded into these websites by various ad networks to create your web profile on the basis of your search results and share it with other members of the network. In order to prevent these networks from doing so, you can always opt out of tracking by going to the browser’s privacy setting option and turn on the ‘Do Not Track’ option.

7. Block All Trackers

For surfing the web anonymously and securely, just opting out of trackers is not enough. Most of the websites across the internet do not respect such browser requests and are still able to track your online search results. However, you can still block all such websites using anti-tracker web browser plugins. These plugins prevent the tracking cookies from following you on the internet. Some of the best anti-tracker plugins include Ghostery, Disconnect or Privacy Badger from Electronic Frontier Foundation.

8. Using Tor Browser

One of the most returned results on how to surf the web anonymously is to use the Tor Browser. This Browser provides the user with the deepest level of anonymity he can have on the internet. Tor distributes your online traffic to a series of nodes on its servers. This ensures that the websites you visit will only get the IP Address of the node through which you are routed and not your address. While Tor makes it impossible for people to track your browsing history, it also slows down the browsing speed. These days most people prefer Tor Browser for access the Deep Web.

The Last Words:

There might be a number of reasons why most people don’t like to be tracked on the internet and might see the need to browse the web anonymously without being followed and all the methods listed above in our article on how to surf the dark web anonymously can prevent various websites and web trackers from tracking your online activities.