For most people, in the days of a consistent stream of shares and updates to social media, anonymity is the exception, rather than the rule. Way back, when the internet first became popular in the US, think early 90s, anonymity was the norm. In fact, that’s one of the reasons it took so long for e-commerce to take off, the internet was too anonymous.
Fast-forward 20 years and everyone is on the internet. Anonymity has vanished. Big companies know who we are either through cookies, logins or other tracking mechanisms. Companies use these means of tracking users to provide what they call “personalized” services. These so-called personalized services can include personalized prices. This is one of the reasons the same flight or hotel will be priced differently for two users. If the companies are able to infer (in some cases know) in which income bracket you are, then they can raise or lower the price to make it more attractive.
Due to the amount of data that companies have collected and/or we have provided, in the past 20 years, it’s pretty difficult to “change” the profile that you’ve generated over time. This leaves us with the next-best option, to become anonymous.
The following chart helps us better understand the tracking methods, their effect, and our available options.
| Tracking Method | Effect | Tool |
| IP Address | Provides approximate location. Will definitely include country, state and city, possibly area of the city. | VPN |
| Cookie | There are various types. The most invasive will track your activity across websites, and the least invasive will be used to provide a welcome <your name here> on the site. | Browser Private Option or Browser Containers |
| Account Login | When you create a user-login, you normally provide sites with a lot of information. Information they can use, or sell to others which can then be used, to track you elsewhere. | Do not login |
| Device being used | On the internet, all requests to a website must include the type of device requesting it. This is known as a user-agent. The user-agent tells the site the browser name, version and device type. | User-agent switcher |
| DNS Queries | Every time you go to a website, your request can be logged for future use | Private DNS |
All 4 of the most popular browsers have an option called private or incognito mode. This option does two things; 1) It creates a fresh browser session. This means that any cookies you would have otherwise began with (Facebook, Google, tracking cookies, etc) will not be present. Think of it almost like a fresh beginning. 2) It does not allow for any tracking information to follow you across sites.
Before you begin browsing in private/incognito mode, you need to obfuscate your IP address. Your IP address can be used to track you even if you use private/incognito mode. Media companies like Google, Facebook, etc, have associated your IP address to your cookies. And while IP addresses do change over time, it does not take much processing power to infer the user given the IP address. For this reason you may have read much about VPNs and how they keep you secure. One of the ways they do this is by routing a lot of traffic (all users of the VPN) through a limited number of IP addresses.
Basically, when you connect to a VPN, you are connecting to a server which, until disconnected, encapsulates all of your requests (going to pages, clicking on links, using apps, etc), encrypts them and sends the requests (on your behalf) as if it were coming from it (the VPN server). Therefore, the IP address the internet sees is the VPN’s IP address. And since VPN companies only need a small number (relatively speaking) of VPN servers to encapsulate and encrypt customer’s traffic, many users’ requests will originate from the same IP address (the VPN’s), making it impossible to infer the user(s) based off it.
With just those two tools, private/incognito mode and a VPN server, you are now almost 100% anonymous, as long as you don’t login to a website :).
Try it yourself; go to your favorite booking site (airlines, car rental, etc) and you’ll notice different prices for the same product(s) depending on whether they can recognize you or not. If you want to test this even further, try VPN’ng from different countries. Because some countries are richer than others, you’ll notice that your “supposed” location will also impact pricing.
I have been using Private Internet Access for the past 2 years. The price is reasonable and my connection speed is adequate for anything I’ve done (video, browsing, chatting, etc). There are other providers out there but for the features, functionality and price Private Internet Access seems the best value for me.
