Tor (The Onion Router) Browser hides your activity and location online by routing all your browsing through multiple anonymous servers, thereby concealing where you are and making it hard (but not impossible) to identify whos doing what online. That means its a good way to access sites that repressive authorities dont want people to see, for whistleblowers to report corruption and illegal activity without getting fired or worse, and to access the deep web.

The deep web is an internet within the internet, not indexed by search engines, and sites ending with the .onion suffix and can only be accessed via Tor. As youd expect, some of those sites are secret for perfectly good reasons - theyre sharing information that someone, somewhere doesnt want shared - but others are secret because theyre fantastically illegal. Browse at your peril and remember that Tor Browser makes it hard to find you, but doesnt offer 100% unbreakable anonymity. In fact, just using Tor may flag you as a person worth watching, and it's banned on many public networks.

There are plenty of legitimate uses though, and not just if youre a political activist. Tor can give you internet access when your internet provider's DNS servers are kaput, and it can keep your browsing free from the advertising trackers that infest so many sites.

Tor Browser looks like Firefox and works like Firefox because it is Firefox. Its not as fast, though: onion routing makes all of your traffic move around much more than in a regular browser, which slows things down considerably.

Its important to realise that Tor cant protect you from risky behaviours, so for example if you run plugins in the browser they may affect Tors ability to protect your privacy. Its crucial that you dont submit information to sites that dont display a blue or green button in the browser address bar to indicate a secure https connection, for example.

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Tor Browser review and where to download | TechRadar