How to use Tor (a guide for the complete beginner)

Part 1 - Motivation

Let's say you want to connect to a website, but you don't want anyone to know which website you are connecting to. First of all, let's talk about who it is that you must hide from in the first place. Some of the parties that can spy on your connection are:

• People looking over your shoulder
• People who use your computer later and check your browsing history
• Other parties on your network
• Your ISP (the company who provides your internet service)
• The government
• The website you are connecting to
• Advertisers

The first think you might try is to browse in an incognito or private browsing session. This protects only from people who use your compuater later and check your browsing history. Your activity is still visible to these parties:

• People looking over your shoulder
• Other parties on your network
• Your ISP (the company who provides your internet service)
• The government
• The website you are connecting to
• Advertisers

If you use an adblocker such as uBlock Origin and/or a script blocker such as NoScript, you can probably protect from most advertisers. Combining this with an incognito or private browsing session still leaves you vulnerable to these parties:

• People looking over your shoulder
• Other parties on your network
• Your ISP (the company who provides your internet service)
• The government
• The website you are connecting to

There are several ways to hide your tracks from the majority of the remaining threats. A simple and popular way is to use a VPN. However, a VPN means that, instead of being visible to other parties on the network, your ISP, and the website you are connecting to, the one who sees is the VPN company. The government can still force the VPN company to reveal your identity, and you have to trust that the VPN won't leak your identity to third parties. This leaves these holes:

• People looking over your shoulder
• The VPN company
• The government

Enter Tor. Tor (see Tor (network) on Wikipedia or Tor (software) in simple English on Wikipedia) is an end-to-end-encrypted anonymizing network which helps to protect the identities of both clients and servers. In practical terms, this means that by using Tor, you can hide your identity when connecting to the internet. It is kind of like a VPN, but better. When you use Tor in ideal conditions, the parties who can see who you are connecting to are:

• People looking over your shoulder