Many of us have been told ‘be safe on the internet, don’t let anyone know who you are’, but how many of us actually know how to do that? Sure don’t give away your full name or address to people online, but what about the things you don’t have control over like your data uploads and downloads. How do you protect that? Thats where TOR comes in.
TOR stands for ‘The Onion Router’ and what it does is bounce your data between randomly selected predetermined nodes so that data can never be tracked directly back to you. When the data is bounced each node can only see the previous node the data came from and the next node the data is going to so no node knows the complete path the data took.
But why is it important to hide your digital footprint? With TOR individuals can access news sites, chat rooms, or other websites that are blocked by their internet service provider. Journalists can use it to safely connect to whistleblowers when other methods of contact would be to risky. On TOR’s own website they even claim that certain branches of the U.S. Navy uses TOR for open source intelligence gathering.
So next time you need to hide your personal data check out TOR for a secure connection.