You Can’t Spell Toronto Without Tor: Anonymous Browsing at Your Local Library
In my recent post, I wrote about how to consider your own actions online, and how to go about addressing the concerns created by those actions – that’s a long-winded way of saying I wrote about Threat Assessment. This time, let’s look at one kind of ‘threat’:
- You are 13, and now realizing that you don’t feel about your body the way your friends seem to feel about theirs; you feel like a stranger in your own skin. You feel you might be transgender, though you are not entirely sure what that is. You need to do some research online, and you really don’t want anyone being able to trace it back to you.
- You have heard about the many data breaches occurring where companies expose personal information to potential criminal actors. You feel you need a tool that provides you with a way to go online without leaving a trail of crumbs for irresponsible companies to pick up, organize, attach to your name, and then lose.
- You are a paren't who has impressed upon their children the importance of keeping secret their personally identifying information when online. But what do you do about all the info revealed through their IP address? And through moves by certain jurisdictions to make that mapping even more precise?
- You are a journalist investigating sexism and harassment inside the RCMP. You receive a tip from a whistle-blower inside, but they will not continue without an anonymous channel.
- You are a random ordinary person doing ordinary things online and are pretty sick of having every search, every website visited, logged and profiled and then sold on to other parties.
These examples all share one thing in common: they all want a way to browse the internet without their activities being mapped back to them. That is, they all need a way to browse anonymously.
Tor Browser is the way.
In a typical browsing situation, different organizations handle a user’s website request: the internet service provider (ISP), the owner of the local computer, the IT management of the local network, and others. All those handlers can see what the user is asking for. Additionally, anyone else with access to the website (such as advertisers who pay to have their trackers on that website, other ‘data aggregators’ like Facebook and Google, etc.) can see the user’s location, what browser and operating system they use, and other information.
Tor Browser prevents this by bouncing the users’ request through three encrypted relays around the world, before it reaches the destination web site. Think of it as writing a letter and sealing it in three successive envelopes, each with a different address. The first recipient (relay) opens the 1st envelope and sends the letter on to the 2nd recipient, who opens the 2nd envelope and sends the letter on to the 3rd address.
It is only the third addressee (that opens the final envelope) who learns what the sender (user) actually wants. The 3rd relay sends the request, and the website sends the page back through the same circuit, so the website doesn’t know where the user comes from either.
Tor Browser does a lot of things and is used by many different people. It’s not a one-tool-for-every-problem, as no single technology is that. It is a great start to making your online life more private.
Why Tor at the Library?
At TPL, we defend your right to read whatever you want to and to think whatever you want to about what you’ve read. That’s called intellectual freedom, and it is a necessary element of any democratic society, and any innovative culture or enterprise. It’s essential even to basic creativity. In this age of mass surveillance, defending intellectual freedom is not only a policy question (and we have a lot of that!), but a technological one as well.
We want the public to try out Tor Browser, so we made it available on public PC’s for a trial period. Come on up to North York Central Library and give it a go.
One thought on “You Can’t Spell Toronto Without Tor: Anonymous Browsing at Your Local Library”
TPL could install other browsers (e.g. Brave/Epic) and vpn services (https://www.bestvpn.com/best-free-vpn-services/) that would also add layers of security, and uninstall those that track users’ activities.