let's open with the most important thing to take away from this video simply
switching on incognito mode or private browsing is not enough to keep your data
safe online also just because you aren't doing anything
illegal doesn't mean that no one is after your personal information and that
there's no benefit to staying private thing is guys these days pretty much
everyone and their dog is out to get your browsing data and that's not
tinfoil hat paranoid delusional stuff
the main reason is that companies and other organizations like political
parties want your eyeballs glued to
their message and the data that they get from your behavior online helps by
giving them an advantage when they serve up those juicy ads everywhere that you
frequent the good news is that staying private online is actually less
difficult than you might think and pretty much anyone can do it so let's go
through some easy strategies starting with one of our favorites using a vpn
like private internet access for those of you new to vpns or virtual
private networks they take in your data
encrypt it then send it through their network of servers before forwarding it
to the destination country of choice when the vpn sends your data out into
the world towards the intended destination it decrypts the data and
makes it look like the data originated from that exit point rather than your
computer so whether you're torrenting or
looking up content that might generate embarrassing ads in your browser the
next time someone sits down at your computer we consider a vpn an essential
part of staying safe online with that said while a vpn does secure
your data in some ways making it so your isp can't tell what you're doing and
allowing you to circumvent most firewall blocks when your information leaves the
vpn network it's all still there and can
be used to track you so a vpn is just
one of the tools in our belt now let's talk about the onion router or
tor as some of you know it we've actually covered tor before but the
summary version goes a little something like this the onion router isn't a
physical router like you'd think of plugging in in your home rather it's an
internet networking protocol that's integrated into the tor web browser and
it's designed to anonymize the data relayed across it
so it keeps your online activity anonymous by encasing your traffic in
multiple layers of encryption then
sending it through a number of nodes that peel back those layers one at a
time this makes it difficult if not impossible for snoops to see your
webmail search history and other online
activity now tor is also imperfect and leaves us
vulnerable until our traffic reaches its network
that's why we're using our pia vpn to mask that initial jump
now thing is using a vpn can actually lead to issues if you are specifically
being hunted by some government agency because your traffic will have a
predictable exit point but for most people whose goal is to thwart more
casual surveillance and advertisers this vulnerability isn't that important
now incognito mode which by the way isn't useless plus a vpn and tor is
pretty good and probably enough for most people but since we're going for the
ultimate private setup we're going to take things a step further with our
secret weapon the hey
there it is super secure password the Linux based
tails is the operating system equivalent
of your weird uncle after too many drinks it's designed to forget
everything it ever heard or saw the
entire os is built around the tor protocol and runs all internet traffic
through the tor network not just your browser traffic one of the other key
benefits of tails is that the os essentially runs off of your computer's
RAM so once you turn off the system poof
any data that was lingering on it is gone and there's nothing to match your
identity to the last browsing session another advantage of this solution is
that you can take it with you and launch it on nearly any computer with a usb
port so then now we are ready to browse the
web anonymously
almost the first thing you'll probably notice about the tor browser is how
similar it looks to firefox and that's not by accident it's because it is
firefox just set up to use the tor protocol and that's nice because it
makes configuring all these little tweaks pretty familiar and
straightforward so in no particular order regardless of our browser choice
we want to make sure that javascript can't run we want to install the privacy
badger extension to stop trackers and provide ad blocking and we want to set
our default search engine to duckduckgo for what i hope would be fairly obvious
reasons so then now
we are fully ready to both browse the web and stick it to the man
at the same time let's do a few tests here to see what that looks like so
we've got two machines for our side by side test a completely vanilla one
running Windows and using google and then our tails Linux one with the tor
browser now something to note is that we're not actually using a vpn on either
of these machines because here we're trying to get a representation of the
worst case scenario and here pia actually doesn't recommend using
their vpn from within tails although they do have a free proxy included with
your account which they do say could be a good idea depending on what it is
you're trying to achieve so let's go ahead and search for expedia
um okay first hit is
expedia.com this one expedia.ca
so immediately our location has been anonymized and also
expedia blocked us from even accessing their site
that's cute did we know that was gonna happen no i
didn't expect him to block tour expedia blocks tor
let's try a different provider we can't tell if you're a human
i'm human expedia dot co dot uk let me through it's like pretty sure i'm a bot
hey taking it sweet time three freaking
catches no we're good all right let's find a
freaking flight here new york departing
tomorrow okay let's do a quick search midirch
now we haven't actually been researching flights and hotels so there may not be
much benefit in terms of pricing to anonymizing any of this but
there's only one way to find out all right so we're looking at 699
canadian round trip and 304
pounds let's do a quick conversion there
556. i just saved 145 dollars
this is the same damn flight and it's over hundred dollars cheaper
includes taxes and fees and then same in canada too including taxes and fees yep
yep yep apples to apples you have you heard it here first expedia hates
canadians now let's do another fun little test let's go to whatismyip.com
that is in fact r.i.p and over here my
public ip is some nonsense i've never seen or heard of before and i'm
apparently based in basel bsch where the devil is that
switzerland now let's do another fun little test let's go on a popular
shopping website like say newegg.com
now let's shop for let's say video cards
maybe an phantom radeon7 uh what's a site with
really really obnoxious ads ah what's that one based in australia
that's like super obnoxious tweektown tweak town
that's it thanks luke
all right and let's have a look at what kind of ads are lurking for us
on the page what do we have here
vancouver to london vancouver to new delhi vancouver to lima and vancouver to
san salvador shockingly they didn't manage to come up
with any graphics cards ads which was sort of what i was going for here but i
think we've made our point as for this well it looks like they're
not getting any ad revenue from us which of course we feel pretty badly about as
an ad supported enterprise ourselves but at the very least we are not being
tracked across the internet which is the only reason that we enabled the ad
blocking on this particular one in the first place you can of course anonymize
your browsing significantly without blocking ads altogether
just saying so for fun we're going to disable both
privacy badger and u-block origin and reload this page
so there's our ads but as you can see they are completely
irrelevant so we've got some scarlet audio
interfaces in whatever language this is and add for the stream deck accel that's
in english at least an ad for Corsair's hydrox series liquid
cooling so there you go
so that was a pretty compelling demonstration of the benefits of private
browsing but it has some clear disadvantages as well
now this machine on the right is actually faster than the one on the left
but you guys might have noticed that browsing from within tails using the tor
browser was slow as hell
that's because the more hops you go through the more latency you're adding
to the connection also some of the creature comforts that
we've gotten used to on the modern web things like shopping carts that remember
all the things that you added to them or websites that remember that you logged
into them so you don't have to enter your password every time that stuff
ain't gonna work over here also something to bear in mind guys is
that no matter what you do it is going to be imperfect
this was a fairly basic guide and privacy browsing is a rabbit hole and a
half furthermore even on a properly set
up machine while you're browsing and searching and almost all of your
internet usage might be basically invisible
nothing is bulletproof because the weakest point in the entire chain exists
between the keyboard and the chair you and i are human and we are nothing
if not creatures of habit and if someone is trying to find you your habits are
likely to end up being the thing that gives you away with all of that said
though for the vast majority of use cases following either of the methods
that we laid out here should obscure your data footprint enough to make it
nearly useless for advertisers and other
parties speaking of advertisers this video is brought to you by pia private
internet private internet access supports a
variety of vpn protocols and types of encryption and authentication allowing
you to dial in the level of privacy that you need they've got apps for Windows
macOS Android Linux and google chrome and you can connect up to five devices
at once using a single account their apps include dns leak protection and
ipv6 leak protection as well as their internet kill switch feature which
blocks all traffic if the vpn becomes disconnected unexpectedly so check it
out today at LMG dot gg slash pia Linus
two we're gonna have that linked down below so thanks for watching guys if this
video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome hit like get subscribed
or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the video
description link below also down there is our merch store it has cool shirts
like this one join our community forum it looks like
that or like that if you're in the tor
browser well