A secure, anonymous, hardened fork of the Firefox web browser
"Tor Browser isolates each website you visit so third-party trackers and ads can't follow you. Any cookies automatically clear when you're done browsing. So will your browsing history."
—https://www.torproject.org/
Forgetting the dark web for a moment, the Tor browser will enable you to securely and anonymously browser the web, using a hardened and enhanced version of the Mozilla Firefox browser. the browser prevents someone watching your connection from knowing what websites you visit. All anyone monitoring your browsing habits can see is that you're using Tor. in addition, it attempts to remove or obfuscate any attempt at tracking or fingerprinting you. The default search engine is DuckDuckGo, protecting you from Google's tracking and spying and logging you and selling/abusing your data. Because the software uses onion routing, your sessions and any information transmitted or recieved, is encrypted, providing another layer of security and privacy.
Who uses it? Well, anyone using the Tails Linux distribution, and anyone who wants to protect their secrets or preserve their privacy. Tinfoil-hatters, in other words. Anyone living in a surveillance state. Journalists doing research. it's also used by people who want or need to access the dark web or any .onion website. Many of these sites are connected with criminal or dodgy activities, of course, but that doesn't mean that all Tor users are after drugs, guns, illegal pornography or wanting to hire assassins. many (most?) simply don't want other people looking over their shoulders at what they're doing. For my part, I don't want the owners of a website to be able to track or identify me, so there was a time when I'd use it to access Reddit, for example. not because i have anything to hide, but as i have said earlier, there are things I simply don't want to show to everyone. All th secrets I have to share are here on E2, beyond that i don't want to show anyone.
So, what is the downside?
So does using this software guarantee your anonymity? Of course not. you can be sure that the NSA, FBI or equivalent state agencies, have tools which will help to uncover illegal or state-damaging activity so if you are engaged in espionage or sharing child sexual abuse material for instance, you're probably already on a list and They will be making extra efforts to track you down. It does make it harder for those agencies, but be assured that he Powers That Be will just take additional steps to uncover you and your activity. The NSA "relies on its vast capability to monitor large parts of the internet. This is done via the agency's partnership with US telecoms firms under programs codenamed Stormbrew, Fairview, Oakstar and Blarney".You would need really good operational security to hide yourself from these people (i.e. disable some Javascript). There is evidence that using Tor will even attract attention from law enforcement, something i alluded to in my Tails writeup, but legbagede was kind enough to locate the evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-anonymity. The NSA in particular is able to identify the use of Tor (Tor users stick out like a sore thumb compared to most internet traffic) and see "almost everything' a user is doing. It's unclear what 'almost everything means", but i suspect it's quite a lot. it is disinctly possible that by using other techniques 9which the NSA certainly has, it's their job to monitor communications after all!), such an agency might even be able to identify the user's real IP address, and hence the users themselves. it's certainly likely that if one were attempting to access say child pornography, that such a user could and would be identified.
I'm not doing anything that law enforcement would be concerned about, so that is not a concern for me: I just don't want the likes of Google, Facebook or any other data-hoovering corporations building a profile of me to sell my metadata to anyone else, so there are occasions when I will break this software out to preserve my privacy and my guilty Reddit secrets.
$ xclip -o | wc -w
678