Privacy concerns are pretty high these days, with ISPs snooping on what you download, throttling bit torrent connections and lawsuits galore. So how do you protect yourself from these privacy concerns?

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The simple answer to this question would be “Staying anonymous on the Internet”, but how? When you browse any website, you are identifiable by a Internet Protocol (IP) address, which links back to your ISP and eventually to your computer.

In order to browse the web anonymously you will need to mask your IP address, so that your computer is protected, but how do you do that?

With the help of a open source project called Tor, a free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

Tor provides users with a small software, that you can download and install on your computer, once you have downloaded the software, it will install a Firefox add-on, that will instantly allow you to browse the web anonymously using Firefox.  

If you are using a different browser like Google Chrome, Opera or Internet Explorer, you can view the help for setting up Tor proxy settings in your browser.

Tor is definitely the best way to protect your privacy, however it could be vastly misused by people, however technology is always exploited in general.

What do you think about this? Are you paranoid enough to want to browse the web anonymously? Will this tutorial help you survive in this online world? Do let us know through your valuable opinions.

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