Tor Browser Experiment

[Axel PC]

So just thought I'd share that I'm going to use Tor browser for 30 days on my laptop and phone I want to see if I can do all the usual web surfing and use the same services I'd normally use with Firefox of Chrome. And maybe I can post my questions about any problems I might encounter here and see if the community here can help me. And no I'm some Alex Jones tinfoil person lol. I'm just aware of the trade off in privacy and convince when it comes to using the internet and online services. And if the experience isn't too hindering maybe I'll end up sticking with it and end up just helping to guard my privacy online that much more, we'll see.

If anyone has any tips or recommendations for me in this little experiment please let me know. Or you just think I'm crazy that's cool too haha.

 

[Neemobeer]

Some thoughts on Tor.

• It only keeps your traffic private from your ISP and between bridge relays
• You never know who is operating the exit nodes and they could easily be harvesting data
• The end service still knows who you are, so not really private in that regard
• Some sites may block the country the exit node is in
• Tor will slow down your traffic
• Other services can leak data if they are not configured for Tor such as DNS
• Some services load different languages based on your IP such as youtube

To be absolutely sure all your data is going over Tor I would suggest building an Onion Pi Overview | Onion Pi | Adafruit Learning System

 

[Axel PC]

Thanks for the reminders @Neemobeer!

Oh wow that is a neat little weekend project. I'll have to bookmark that site and look into that. I'll definitely post if I try making it, thanks!

 

[Neemobeer]

If you do create one and get stuck let me know.

 

[Axel PC]

Thanks I'll definitely let you know if I have any problems.

 

[Axel PC]

So this week was pretty tough. Most websites I typically surf showed up fine to loaded weird on it. So no big deal. HOWEVER some important websites that I regularly go to didn't work on it. And those sites are important and I had to use Firefox to use. So that was disappointing.

I was hit with constant captcha verifications on a lot of sites that i had a login for. That was very annoying. Ive encountered this with my. VPN. So I'm used to it. But it pretty much was on every site that I logged into with Tor.

Suprising thing was that ads still show up on Toronto browser compared to Firefox with the add-ons I had installed. Even compared to Brave browser Tor browser allowed more ads to get through.

So that's my experience for the first week.

 

[Neemobeer]

Yeah sounds about right. Tor will never stop ad's or malware, you'd need a content filtering proxy or the add-ons will work as well

 

[Axel PC]

Ah OK. I was just assuming that between NoScript and whatever else they tweaked on it that it would. And I don't want to install any add-ons other than the ones they have because hsts what they recommend. And for the sake of this little experiment I want to use it as it's made.

Would that Raspberry project you linked take care of those ads making it through?

 

[Neemobeer]

Not unless you blocked all the ad site ip address ranges and there are a ton of them and they can change.

 

[Axel PC]

So I've kind of giving up on using Tor browser as a daily driver. It was just too slow and constant issues with financial websites just brought it to a halt. I've just stuck with FF as my daily.

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