It’s pretty simple to hide what you’re doing online. You’ve basically got two options, a) use a VPN, and b) use TOR. I’ll discuss both here. I’m simply sharing this information to answer questions. I’m not suggesting you use this for any dark reasons. Be good!
The simplest way to hide your activity is to use the TOR browser. It’s free, simple to get started, Legal (in Australia at the time i write this) and has a good reputation. TOR is available for all popular operating systems including Apple MacOS, Windows 10 and Linux distributions.
Using a VPN to hide your Internet activity
A VPN is a “Virtual Private Network” which businesses often use to allow staff to access company IT resources while out of the office. Essentially it’s just an encrypted tunnel between the roaming computer (laptop, workstation, smart phone, etc) and the company servers and network. Anything sent between the two ends (the roaming computer and the office servers) is hidden from anyone who might intercept the information as it passes over the Internet. You can create your own VPN of use a pre-built VPN from a business offering it to you. You could opt to place your VPN server in another country. The advantage to this is that your ISP would not know what you’re doing online except that there is traffic coming from your service and going to somewhere else on the Internet. Don’t get complacent though. Whilst everything between you and the VPN is encrypted, there is no guarantee about what’s happening at the VPN server side. For instance, the VPN service needs an ISP too, right? Otherwise how would they get to the Internet. The remote ISP could log your activity. Could they associate that with you personally? Possibly. But only if ISP and the VPN service provider cooperated.
Using TOR to hide your Internet activity
TOR is short for “The Onion Ring” which allows you to surf the web by “bouncing” your session all over the world. Here’s how it works. You start by downloading the TOR browser from “https://www.torproject.org/download/download”. Install it and away you go. Behind the scenes, when you surf the web using the TOR browser, the session between your computer and the web server that you’re connecting to actually bounces around the world several times first (in a random way) such a that the target server doesn’t know who you are. The logs on the target server would show one of the “bounces” but not your public IP address. Be careful though because if you logged into Facebook with the TOR browser, Facebook would know who you are based on that fact that you logged in – they’d know who you are and what IP address your coming from. That information combined with other information (such as that from other web servers) could create a picture of who you are and what you were doing. But that does mean Facebook and other online services should have to share your information around. Possible. It’s worth considering that your DNS queries go over the TOR too. For instance, when you type in “www.example.com” into a normal web browser such as Firefox or Chrome, your computer first needs to work out which server “www.example.com” points to. Only then can it go and retrieve the content you’re seeking. Because you’re computer needs to resolve “www.example.com” to an IP address that tells your ISP where you’re intending to visit. However, with the TOR browser, the DNS query goes over the TOR network and not direct to your normal DNS server. This is a good thing.
Note that if you opt to go with TOR, only your TOR browser activity goes over the TOR network and is hidden. Anything else such as sending emails from Outlook and Torrenting is not over TOR. having said that, both Email and Torrenting can use encryption. TOR does have more applications and can work at a lower level forcing “everything” you do to go over TOR.