On Privacy: Tips on trying to stay anonymous on the Internet

Instead of Google search directly, use https://startpage.com

They use Google search but they place themselves as the middle-man. You send whatever you want to search for to startpage, they send your request to Google as though it was from them. Then whatever Google returns, they send it back to you.

Keep in mind that not everything is kept from Google in this process. Your browser type and OS type are still shared (mostly its so you would get back relevant results) but your IP address is not shared and neither is Google able to set cookies on your computer since there is no direct interaction between your computer and Google.

In the end you have to remember that you are putting your trust in the claims of startpage. So you're trusting one company over another. At this point though, trusting startpage over Google doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

(https://duckduckgo.com is similar in claims but I haven't tested it. They do not seem to be using Google at all though.)

https://www.torproject.org/ is a very handy tool if one wants privacy. I don't use it but the website has a lot of information on how to effectively use Tor so you avoid detection.

As for browsers, so far only Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/) seems to have joined the fight against NSA tracking US citizens (which makes sense since IE and Chrome belong to two of the companies that are happy to share information with the government).

If you wanted to go a step further, you could dump OSX and Windows and go with Linux or BSD of some kind but I use Linux for Desktop from time to time and I would never recommend it someone who doesn't want to constantly keep on fixing stuff on their computers. Linux is great as a server, it sucks as a Desktop environment. I haven't tried any of the freely available BSD OS so I can't really comment on it (If you did want to try out Linux, I would recommend Fedora http://fedoraproject.org/ but like I've already warned you about Linux for Desktop so ask me or others on the internet for information before you go screwing up your computer. Oh and please stay away from that ugly orange OS called Ubuntu).

Well that should do for now. If you REALLY wanted to be private and anonymous then I would just unplug your internet cable and throw away your router. If you want to be connected to the internet and want to be completely anonymous then you're asking for a dream-world that, I'm afraid, doesn't exist.

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