Complete newbie. Feel free to ELI5. I like data privacy and I don’t like the idea of companies knowing a bunch of things about me and selling my data. From an internet perspective, I pretty much just check email and news, take care of my finances, shop online, listen to music, and go down rabbit holes of learning about random things. I’m not into porn or drugs and my country has free speech so I’m lucky to not worry about censorship. Would TOR even have a benefit for someone like me, to prevent companies from gathering my data? I’ve heard you’re not supposed to log into your personal accounts on TOR and that you can’t use Google to look things up on TOR either. Is this true? Everything I do seems to fall into one of the above categories, so what would someone like me even do with it?
Google doesn’t like TOR, but DuckDuckGo works fine.
The moment you log into a personal account via TOR you are defeating the entire purpose of using it, which is to be anonymous. I would also advise against doing web searches for anything that could be tied back to you.
I use it for the same browsing normies do on the clear net, I do this knowing that it is contributing to the swarm and helping keep others anonymous just by using it.
I like to use it for research purposes. You find different articles and sources depending on which country you choose.
You could absolutely use TOR this way but there are probably easier ways to go about blocking data collection with regular web browsers. TOR is inherently a lot slower because of how the network works, it would be kinda clunky. Like driving a tank to the grocery store and back because you want a safer car.
I could see tor having a place in your rabbit holes on random things depending on how random you’re referring to.
If you are looking into something random that has an onion address you will have to use tor… but if you are looking into something that you don’t necessarily want your ip associated with, tor is a good alternative to a paid VPN for one off searches and the occasional coffee shop browsing session.
Tor is slow compared to a dedicated vpn but it does have the added benefit of being a distributed network so you don’t have to worry about the company storing your browsing records. If you are going to use it to log into an account that has EVER been logged into in the clear then that benefit is moot.
If you spend a lot of time on public networks i would go ahead and pay for a vpn service as the service will be far faster and you’re going to use it to log into your accounts anyway.
Other than those caveats, tor browser is just firefox with some additional features so like someone else already mentioned go ahead and install ublock on firefox for normal browsing and a good amount of the anti-tracking will be handled by that setup.
Edit: stop using google for searches and use ddg or brave search instead. And uninstall any firefox extensions that don’t pass the sniff test for tracking technology.
It’s definitely not something a lot of average people use.
Believe it or not, even in “free countries” you have censorship. If you were around 10 years ago, you’ll know that Google shows vastly different results now and will not even return results with a specific name most of the time.
There are lots of things you can do with Tor.
Research within different hacking communities to get a better understanding of security.
Other forms of research via wikis and news sites specific to tor.
Monero and other cryptocurrency privacy by routing all transactions through tor so you aren’t being tracked as easily.
Drugs and porn cross into the dark side of things IMO and unfortunately a lot of Tor search engines advertise awful things nowadays that you will need to be careful with.
A lot of normal people just haven’t had the time to realize that other options exist out there and can’t comprehend that they are being censored. Personally I have used tor since I was 10 and I know when I can’t locate something I’m probably being censored.
Sure you can use tor for whatever you want but if you’re already content with your current browser, why switch and be more paranoid from things you heard online?
I use it for research and the reason using Tor you can access to the deep web, and also avoid not being flag just because you do researching.
You will be better off using a VPN and using the ublock extension. If you don’t have a reason to use tor, you don’t have to.
Manga. I learned my lesson young what reading manga or watching anime does to your ‘targeted ads’
There’s actually a pretty cool Star Trek fansite in there, which is the primary reason I have Tor installed lol.
I use it when I need to send big files to people. Spin up a hidden service and send them the link!
No need to register a domain or anything.
When I need to expose a service to only a few people? Same thing with client auth added on top.
Need remote access to a server without exposing SSH to the whole internet? Run it on loop back and only expose it as a hidden service. You can even add client auth on top again.
Tor is very versatile and onion services have a multitude of uses, most of them boring.
It works, it’s boring, it fits 99% of my boring usecases.
just here to say thanks for posting…didn’t think there were other similarly boring people like me on the internet. lol
I use TOR to wrap my IP temporarily. I will keep it a secret why I want to “spoof” my IP though.
General browsing on clearnet websites?
The most legit non dark web use case is censorship circumvention which can be solved by using the faster and stable VPN or proxy
Mostly DN stuff cataloguing sites… when I’m being “Boring”
I use it to access my bitcoin node remotely. Not sure if that’s boring but it’s nerdy af
maybe just use brave browser w/ a vpn (optional)?
I use Tor to transfer small files between devices. Encrypted, of course.