You don’t need to have evil motives for wanting to fake your identity or go incognito online; for many people, it’s a matter of privacy and avoiding spammers and scammers. Thankfully, there are a great many tools for staying anonymous online. Here are a few of the best.
The Browser’s Incognito Mode
The private browsing mode in Google Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers records no information about your browsing, including form data you enter, files you download or history of pages you visit. It’s handy for many things beyond porn. To launch a window in private browsing mode, use these keyboard shortcuts:
- Chrome and Opera: Ctrl+Shift+N
- Firefox, Internet Explorer: Ctrl+Shift+P
For Safari, go to Safari > Private Browsing.
What about mobile devices? Use an alternative mobile browser that will clear your browsing history for you automatically, such as our pick for best web browser on iPhone, Atomic Web Browser, or Android browser top pick, Dolphin.
Private Browsing Tricks
If you want to open your browser in private mode all the time, add a simple switch to your browser’s shortcut.
We’ve also previously mentioned a Firefox extension called Private Browsing Window, which starts a new private browsing window in Firefox without closing your old ones.
Proxy Servers and VPNs
Although private browsing mode is great for preventing sites from writing trackable cookies and other info to your computer, it doesn’t completely make you anonymous. If you want the most assurance that others won’t know who you really are, you’ll want to use a proxy server and/or a virtual private network connection so you can appear to be someone and somewhere else.
The free Tor software is one of our favourites for anonymising our online sessions. It routes web requests through multiple tunnels, preventing sites from knowing who or where you are.
If you want to set up your own secure, encrypted system to access on the go, you can do this usingHamachi and Privoxy, tunnelling traffic using your own home computer.
Another alternative is previously mentioned Windows app CyberGhost VPN, which is free for up to six hours of surfing or 1GB of downloading.
Disposable Email Addresses And Anonymous Email Sending
Disposable email address services hide your real email address and keep the spam out by giving you a temporary email address that forwards to your real one. There are so many different disposable email services to choose from, and we’ve mentioned quite a few. Spamgourmet is one of the earliest services and still great. You might also like Trashmail, which as we mentioned before, offers Firefox and Chrome extensions for convenience.
Fake Your Identity
Looking to disappear and establish a new identity in real life? We’ve got some excerpts from How to Disappear that can help you formulate a plan to ditch Big Brother and disappear forever.
Image: gaelx.
Lifehacker’s Evil Week is all about topics such as password cracking, social hacking and other questionable tricks to make sure you’re in the know. Knowledge is power, and whether you use that power for good or evil is in your hands.