How To Become Invisible Online

[Music] alright so in this video i'm gonna show you everything you need to know to become truly invisible online i'll explain which tools you need and what they do i'm gonna show you the three levels of anonymity so that you get an idea of where you wanna place yourself and i think that pretty much everyone should at least start to implement level one anonymity and by the end of this video you'll have a good understanding of what it actually takes to browse the web anonymously so uh let's get started all right so i've put timestamps in the description in case you want to jump around to a specific section that is of most interest to you but as always i recommend watching it in the intended order since i put the video together in that way for a reason so to start off uh the kind of anonymity that most people are looking for is actually sort of easy to get but it won't be completely invisible however being completely invisible is something that is fairly useless to most of us and is not actually what we're looking for the only reason that you would actually need to be completely invisible is if some sort of like government agency pretty much is trying to track you down like actively looking for you so i will still explain how to become truly invisible but i just wanted to add this in here so that you know that for most of us there's no point in going through that much effort which is what it takes to actually become truly invisible if you just want to hide then that's actually pretty easy to do because hiding online essentially just comes down to trying to leave as few tracks behind as possible and also scattering those tracks as far apart as possible so that it becomes really difficult to actually track down who you are or where you're at i think that there's a major misconception when it comes to what most people think that google and facebook and all of these companies do when it comes to tracking us they track what you allow them to track and the most part of that are things that you actually give to them freely you store your photos on google cloud you send imessages you create profiles with your name and add your friends on facebook bookmark websites on chrome follow the people and products that you like on instagram give out your home address to amazon most of the things that are being tracked about us are actually things that we've given out freely and consciously there are sometimes things that we give out without knowing because we didn't read the long ass form before hitting accept but most of it would give out consciously and even if we're not consciously aware or we didn't think of the fact that this can later on be used to track us so therefore the first step to becoming invisible online is to stop handing out these flyers of personal information stop giving them things that can be used to track you so now let's get into the three levels of anonymity online and let's start with the level that i think everyone should start implementing level one becoming hard to hack becoming hard to hack is what i consider the base step that i think everyone should take so here are the three steps to becoming harder to hack and don't worry because i'll go through each of them in detail number one create strong passwords number two always give out minimum personal information to the sites that you visit number three create multiple emails okay so let's start with number one creating strong passwords so a long password is a strong password so i would suggest using something like 25 characters or more for every password and i know that this is a lot for most people but computers today have become a lot faster and that means that shorter passwords are way easier to crack so the best way to protect against that is to create long and complex passwords the problem with long and complex is that most of us humans really struggle with remembering like a really long sequence of randomized letters and numbers and symbols and so the way that we solve that is to essentially come up with something that we can remember and that would be something like a sentence that you remember really well or that you know really well or a phrase of some kind or just a song lyric for instance that's something that a lot of people use and then what you do is you create a rule set of some kind that you make up for yourself and that rule set you use to change this phrase in some sort of way a super common one that you should absolutely not use is to replace specific letters with numbers that look like the letters so 4 means a 3 means e 7 means t etc this is good but everyone pretty much knows this thing so don't use that but what you should do is you should do something similar but create a rule that's a lot more random than that one maybe replace every i with the percentage symbol so you start off by writing down a song lyric or a sentence of some kind that is easy for you to remember then you start replacing letters for symbols maybe even combinations of symbols so an a might actually turn into a an and sign and a curly brace and an equal sign now not only does that add a couple extra characters to your password but it also adds a ton of complexity while at the same time being easy for you to remember and this or what you would be doing here is actually a form of encryption you're constructing your own rules for an encryption algorithm because that's pretty much all that an encryption algorithm does it takes some sort of input and then it does certain things to that input based on certain rules and out comes gibberish this is an oversimplified version of that however it is a great way to create your own passwords but make sure that you write down your rules somewhere so now we have a strong password but we need to be able to store this somewhere most of us will use a note on our phone or add in new contacts for each password which is not very safe but i know that most of you guys will still continue doing this so here's a way to do that and make it a little bit more secure if you use the system for creating a password that i outlined before where you basically replace certain characters of the password for different things then what you could do is you could actually store the password as it is before you actually change those things that way even if someone finds your list of passwords they're unlikely to get into your accounts but you can make it even safer than that you can actually create rules for storing your passwords as well let's say that when you write down a password in your notes you always divide the numbers in that password by two or if you use a song lyric or sentence that you like then you may not need to store the entire sentence if your password is based on the song it's the final countdown then maybe you don't need to store the entire sentence you might only need to store it's the final or countdown or if it's i like big butts and i cannot lie you might only need to write down i like bots but do keep in mind that if your password is based on a really famous song then that actually makes it a little bit easier for a hacker to actually crack your password because the way that a hacker cracks a password is by utilizing something called word lists these are lists with thousands if not millions of the most common passwords so the program basically runs through all the words or passwords in that list and combines them in different ways to speed up the password cracking and i believe that common song lyrics are often in these sort of lists the better way to do all of this is actually to use a password manager because a password manager will take care of not only creating a lot more random passwords but it will also take care of remembering those passwords for you as well or storing them for most people i would recommend using something like dashlane and they're not paying me to say this even though they probably should so i can also say that dashlane is not foolproof but it is what most people actually are looking for and there are also other ones out there like lastpass and lots of other things but i haven't used any of them so i can't really recommend them if you want something a little bit more secure than that then you can find an open source password manager like keepass for instance the benefit with open source can be that lots of people can see how keepass was built so hopefully that means that potential bugs get fixed compared to something like dashlane where we can't actually see how it was built and so there could be some sort of vulnerability within their system that just hasn't been detected yet the ultimate would be to build your own password manager and store that on a usb stick that way it's very unlikely that someone else will find your passwords and even if they do find that usb stick they still need to get into your password manager which you've hopefully made really difficult but also that means that you need to plug in that usb stick anytime you need to log in somewhere and this is kind of the theme for this whole video it's that you usually end up trading convenience for security and anonymity and usually the more secure and anonymous something is the more effort it takes to actually use it so that's all you need to know about creating and storing really secure passwords so now let's move on to the next step of level one anonymity which is to stop giving out personal details to everyone if you buy something online then you may not actually need to enter in all the details accurately for instance my favorite life hack here is to actually enter in your local postal pickup point as your home address so anytime you buy something online then just enter in their address into the address field your thing will get shipped to them and the company you bought it from doesn't have your home address the other part to this is to just keep in mind that everything that you enter into any form online can be used to like identify or track you when you create passwords for certain accounts sometimes they ask you to answer some security questions in case you ever need to reset your password if they do that then you don't need to answer those questions accurately you can actually make it up as long as you remember the answers if they ask where you were born you can answer jupiter as long as you remember the answer it will work so this step also ties into the next step of level 1 anonymity which is to create multiple email addresses and this is something that may not feel like it would be something that you want to do but i highly recommend doing it the way you would do it is that you can create emails for different parts of your life maybe one for shopping one for business or work one for social media and one for personal stuff like friends and family this both increases your online security and your privacy if one of these emails gets hacked then all your stuff doesn't get hacked in hacking or cyber security they often talk about single points of failure and that you want to avoid that you want to avoid having one single email address that is connected to everything because if you do then someone who hacks that email has access to everything this may seem a little bit extreme or a bit too much effort but it doesn't need to be that much you can create super simple names like jonsnowshopping gmail.com that could be your shopping email and then you can do the same thing for everything else as well and that actually makes things a little bit more organized too if you ever need to find an email from that purchase that you made a couple months back then you don't need to search through all of your emails from that time period but you only need to search through the account related to shopping i highly recommend doing this and it also means that you'll get less spam for your personal email all right so when it comes to learning these sort of things that i do for making these sort of videos basically the first step will be researching and just learning how these things actually work and a great resource for this is today's video sponsor which is skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with well over 25 000 different classes it's really affordable at only 10 a month for an annual subscription and the first 1000 people that click the link in my description will get a free trial of skillshare premium and skillshare is really a super valuable resource for me most of what i do is learn how things work and then deliver that knowledge to you guys in videos like this one and skillshare is something that i actually pay for and that i was using before they ever contacted me and one of my favorite recent classes that i've been watching is mkbhd's course on how he makes his videos with tons of useful tips and tricks so that class is a hot tip from me they also have tons of classes on programming and even pretty much any topic that you can think of so you can literally pick and choose from thousands of classes it's a great place to start and again the first 1000 people to use the link in my description will receive a free trial of skillshare premium so sign up for it i mean you can try it for free so why not okay so that's level one become hard to hack now let's get to the next level level two become hard to track however the first part to this is not difficult and this is also what will give you the anonymity that most people are actually looking for this is to use the tor web browser to understand why tor is better than chrome for browsing the web anonymously we first need to understand what can be used to identify you on the web now this could be an entire book so i'm just going to explain what i think are the most important points that you need to understand so first off there's lots of things that can be used on the web to identify who you are or where you are and the main one being your ip address which is very accurately named because your ip address is a unique address that is associated with your device on the web okay so you may not think that there's much correlation between a postal office and the web but the web actually operates a lot like a postal office if you want to watch a youtube video then youtube needs to send that video to you so youtube needs some way of knowing where to send it so you need to have some sort of address that is unique to you so that the video will get to the right place same as a letter in the mail but if you don't want the postal office to know your address then you can give them an address of someone else that you know or the address to a postal box somewhere that you have access to meaning you basically hide your address which is what you want to do if you want to browse the web anonymously you want to hide your ip address you may have heard of vpns and they basically do what i explained that you could do with the post office they're basically another address that you can send mail to they then forward that mail via their own service to your home address meaning that they know your home address so using a vpn will actually hide you somewhat from the place that you're trying to connect to but it won't make you disappear in order to disappear you need to actually have your ip address disappear or to change this is where the tor web browser comes in what tor does is it randomizes your ip address so that it looks like you're someone else somewhere else your ip address becomes virtually invisible not entirely but extremely close and again i will explain how to become entirely invisible later on in the video in level 3 anonymity tor also uses end-to-end encryption meaning that it will encrypt every request you send it also encrypts your data multiple times so you can think of that as layers of an onion each time they encrypt your information another layer is added to the onion this is why this method is referred to as onion routing and it also makes it virtually untraceable so for most of us looking to browse the web anonymously tor will do what we need the second step to level two anonymity is to use encrypted messaging apps like chat secure and signal are the most commonly used ones and the ones that are considered the most anonymous there's also whatsapp that uses end-to-end encryption but it's owned by facebook so there is some debate as to whether or like how safe it actually is you also need to activate this feature for each chat and the person or persons that you're chatting to also needs to enable it the idea for increased anonymity is essentially just to use more encryption usually the more encrypted something is the more anonymous it becomes so look for apps that allow for end-to-end encryption for messaging emailing and phone calls for emailing protonmail is one choice of service that you can use you can also use something like mailvelope which is something that you can use in combination with your regular email provider to encrypt your emails and ideally you would use these two in combination with the tor web browser so now we're getting closer to becoming completely invisible now you know how to achieve level one anonymity and level two anonymity you're hard to hack and you're hard to track so now let's take this to the next level in every sense of that word level three total invisibility all right so this is going to escalate really quickly and that is because it's fairly easy to become almost invisible but to disappear entirely without a trace is it takes a lot of effort and so let me explain how it can be done so your ip address can be used to track you down but there are other things that can be used as well like the device that you're using the operating system or the wi-fi or internet that you are connected to your internet service provider or isp screen size and even resolution all of these things can be used to different effectiveness to try to build up an idea of who you are and where you are so if we want to become completely invisible then we need to account for all of these things so here's how to do that so firstly we're going to address the tiny vulnerability in the tor web browser that could potentially expose who you are or where you're at and this is known as the exit node problem so if you remember earlier i explained that tor randomizes your ip address and this is done using nodes which are essentially routers all over the world so when you connect to a website via tor it will encrypt your request and send it through several randomly selected nodes on the tor network and then finally it will arrive at the website that you connected to everything is encrypted and safe all the way until we reach what is called the exit node which is essentially the last router before we get to the website at this stage the request is decrypted and sent in plain text so that you can actually access the site so the problem here is that the person who controls the exit node could potentially figure out who sent the request and if they do that then you're no longer anonymous especially not if you're using your home computer there are a few options for protecting against this the first one is to use what is called a proxy you can think of a proxy as essentially a computer that is somewhere else so what you could do then is that you could connect to this proxy or computer remotely and then you could access tor via that proxy and then the exit node doesn't know about your details it only knows about the proxy's details the problem with proxies is that you might not actually be able to trust them since you might not be the person that actually controls the proxy and so the way to solve this is to either become the proxy or to create your own proxy and both of these are possible and they both have different advantages and disadvantages so let's start with actually creating your own proxy this essentially just means that you need to set up a computer somewhere that has internet connection and that is always on one way that this could work in theory is to connect a raspberry pi to a public wi-fi somewhere and then hide it somewhere there so as you can tell we're getting to some really next level things right now but the idea is that you buy a raspberry pi using cash somewhere and then you set it up so that you can access it remotely then you go to starbucks or somewhere where there's a public wi-fi that you can connect to and you basically leave the raspberry pi there if you hide it thoroughly then it will be there for longer and now you can connect to your own proxy server from home that you actually control and you can browse the web using tor and you will be invisible when you browse the other option here is to become the proxy and this is high effort but it's definitely doable to do this you need to do a couple of things you first need to buy a laptop somewhere using cash so that it can't be traced back to you and then you need to never turn that computer on anywhere near your home only turn it on when you're away or quite far away from your home so this essentially becomes a useless computer you can only use it in public places or at least in places with public wi-fi and this means that even if you connect to a compromised exit node nothing can be traced back to you since even if we get to your ip address there will be no record of who bought it and you are in a starbucks so we also cannot figure out where you live however if we're getting this far into it then we have to assume that someone is determined and looking to actually get you which means that we need to be considering things like actually surveillance footage or security cameras and so the way to avoid that is essentially to hide your face in some sort of way for these cameras and right now this is actually a pretty good time because right now face masks are actually socially acceptable because of the thing that's going on and so therefore what you could do is you could just put on a face mask put up a hoodie and that way you'd actually be able to hide yourself fairly well from surveillance footage it'd be really difficult to actually figure out who you are from that we can solve the problem of security cameras in other ways mainly by buying a prepaid burner phone or a 4g internet modem that you can use to connect to the internet what you do here is again wear a face mask along with a hoodie and you become almost unrecognizable then you go into a store and you pay with cash to get a phone with a prepaid sim card that has data i would recommend getting a phone over a 4g internet modem because with a phone you actually get a phone number and this phone number can then be used to set up an anonymous email with gmail you can actually use gmail anonymously but you would need to take all of these previous precautions burner phone and basically a burner laptop because when you sign up for gmail you need a phone number to verify your account so for that you can use your new anonymous phone number and voila you now have an anonymous gmail account now of course you need to make sure that you never search for things that can be related to you in any sort of way and you also need to make sure that you again never turn them on inside your home or anywhere close to your home and ideally that you also turn them on only in randomized spots so that you keep randomizing where you turn it on if you always turn them on and use them at the same starbucks three streets down from your home then your location is now a lot more easy to track we can narrow it down to somewhere near this place if you look up the weather that can also be used to figure out your location if you ever enter in some sort of personal information into any form of search that you do then you're compromised so i'm guessing at this point that most of you realize that this sort of anonymity is not really feasible for most of us it's just too much effort to actually maintain and too little reward and so i would say that unless you're doing something illegal then level two anonymity is really where you wanna be at and maybe even slightly less than level two because becoming truly invisible is really hard work and most of us really don't need true invisibility so yeah that's it for this one i hope you enjoyed it and that you learned something about this and how to browse the web anonymously i will leave links to all the things that are mentioned and also some resources like the art of invisibility by kevin mitnick which was a huge help for making this video and yeah i hope you enjoyed it make sure to subscribe if you want to see more videos like this and i hope i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Kalle Hallden

Views: 292,569

Rating: 4.9572587 out of 5

Keywords: How To Browse The Internet Anonymously, how to browse the web anonymously, how to be anonymous on the internet, how to be anonymous, browse the, browse the internet anonymously, browse the web anonymously online

Id: S4E4yAktjug

Length: 24min 5sec (1445 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021