Using the Internet Without Leaving a Trace: a How-To Guide
There may be a time, especially in the upcoming presidency, when you find yourself wanting to use online resources but not leaving any sort of digital “paper trail” behind. People in China do this to read news on websites that are blocked by the Great Firewall of China — news content that may differ from the approved government-run news sources within the country. As the US starts its possible slide into authoritarianism and fascism, there may be a time when looking up abortion resources or digitally talking openly with queer people carries risk.
Everything you do on the web leaves a footprint. On your local machine, you have bookmarks, browser history, and browser cache. The path between your browser and the web server you are looking at is almost always encrypted these days. This means that what you read and type is private, but the metadata — what you connected to and when — is visible to anyone in-between, whether it’s the IT department at work, the other WiFi patrons at the coffee shop, or your ISP. They won’t know what you’re looking at or signing up for at Planned Parenthood, but they can see you were connected to the PP server. The website itself logs the IP address of everyone that connected. This is often used for stats about traffic, but search warrants can obtain those addresses and correlate them back to who was using that address at that time. And finally, websites are often not just a single entity — they pull resources from elsewhere. You may trust a given website, but if they serve ads from an ad network or include a Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr like button or single-sign-on button or even employ 3rd party JavaScript libraries for functionality, those other entities will also have your IP address in a log somewhere, with the same risks. In fact, there may be greater risk, since advertisers can be unscrupulous about the data they collect, and will do their best to correlate it into a profile on you.
There is a spectrum of threat-actors you might want to hide your internet traffic from. Maybe you want to learn about binders and gaff without parents or advertising networks knowing. Maybe you’re in an abusive relationship with someone paranoid and overbearing and you need to research an escape plan. Maybe you’re in a state where abortions are illegal, the state government offers a bounty for turning in anyone involved with helping get an abortion, and so you need to make covert plans. Maybe you’re helping organize a protest along the lines of BLM or Occupy. Or maybe you’re a whistle-blower and need cover while passing along sensitive files.
