Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Way to Browse the Web Anonymously?

An anonymous reader asks: In an age of evercookies, zombie cookies, and always expanding efforts to track browsers, devices, and people -- is there any way to browse totally anonymous to the sites you are visiting?
With so many technologies quietly monitoring your activity, "How can a user today browse with confidence that they can't be tracked or identified, avoiding even being identified anonymously as a returning user or device?" Leave your best answers in the comments. What's the best way to browse the web anonymously?

Comments

Serious Answer

[Notabadguy]

Depending on your level of paranoia...

Surf the web with the TOR browser through an anonymizer (IP Scrambler) through VPN on a device that you purchased with cash on someone else's wireless network.

Pick and choose to suit your level of paranoia.

As a sleeper spy says: Act "normal"

[Anonymous Coward]

If you act as a "normal user" of your ethnicity, religion, etc., this is the best way to remain "anonymous".
You don't use an anonymizer, anonymous browsing function, etc. because most people don't use them.

Then, when you really need to be "anonymous", you go to a public library or any commercial place that lets you browse the web without registering your ID.
You go there dressed like everyone else or bit cleaner, being nice but not annoying and do what you need to do and leave.

Socially being anonymous is always better than using any technology to remain anonymous because people who are trying to track you are looking for "oddness", not "normalness".

Anonimity

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to be anonymous on the web? Don't do anything that attracts any particular attention to you.

Chances are, you are painfully insignificant, so nobody is tracking or spying on you, other than through "lazy" mechanisms, i.e., cookies and logging. This is the digital equivalent of paying someone to write down a physical description of every person that entered the mall.

This form of tracking is rather benign, in a tumor sort of way. You can avoid most of it by not using Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc, and by blocking known ad and tracking domains. For all intents and purposes, you don't exist to them, hence, anonymity.

However, using tor, proxies, vpns and asking around "how to be anonymous" is a great way to pin a big bullseye on your forehead. Your traffic may be encrypted, but "they" will know that you are hiding something by virtue of what your are connecting to. Remember, your IP address is public, and between you and the VPN provider, there are dozens of places where your traffic can be monitored.

A high number of "this IP address connected to a known tor entry point" should be enough to pique "their" interest.

Best course of action is to hide in plain sight and keep your nose clean.

Re:Whonix on Qubes OS

[Ol Olsoc]

I run Tor on Whonix through Tails. If you don't do this, I think you're an idiot, because the NSA and FBI are spying on you.

And when you use Tor, you become very interesting.