{"id":625084,"date":"2023-04-03T09:49:09","date_gmt":"2023-04-03T14:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/03\/the-tor-projects-new-privacy-focused-browser-doesnt-use-the-tor-network\/"},"modified":"2023-04-03T09:49:09","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T14:49:09","slug":"the-tor-projects-new-privacy-focused-browser-doesnt-use-the-tor-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/03\/the-tor-projects-new-privacy-focused-browser-doesnt-use-the-tor-network\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tor Project\u2019s new privacy-focused browser doesn\u2019t use the Tor network"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Tor Project, the organization behind the anonymous network and browser,<\/a> is helping launch a privacy-focused browser that\u2019s made to connect to a VPN instead of a decentralized onion network. It\u2019s called the Mullvad browser, named after the Mullvad VPN company it\u2019s partnered with on the project, and it\u2019s available for Windows, Mac, or Linux.<\/a><\/p>\n

The Mullvad browser\u2019s main goal is to make it harder for advertisers and other companies to track you across the internet. It does this by working to reduce your browser\u2019s \u201cfingerprint,\u201d a term that describes all the metadata that sites can collect to uniquely identify your device. Your fingerprint<\/a> can be made up of simple things, like what browser and operating system you\u2019re using, to more invasive info, like what fonts and extensions you have installed, and what input \/ output devices your browser has access to. <\/p>\n

Looking at all those factors can make it easy to uniquely identify you just based on your fingerprint, without the need for things like cookies or other tracking tech. There are various tools that can show you how fingerprintable your browser is, but I personally recommend the EFF\u2019s<\/a> because it does a good job of explaining the results.<\/p>\n

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\"Screenshot<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The Mullvad browser looks pretty much like any other FireFox fork, so you won\u2019t have to learn an entirely new way of browsing.<\/em><\/figcaption>

Image: The Tor Project \/ Mullvad VPN<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

By default, Mullvad browser makes it harder for websites to fingerprint you by masking that metadata. It also blocks third-party cookies and trackers, and comes with few pre-installed plugins to reduce your fingerprint even further. (Other privacy-focused browsers like Brave say they block fingerprinting<\/a> but come with a lot of extensions<\/a> that could be identified if a website\u2019s able to get around their protections.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible to configure a browser like FireFox, which Mullvad browser (and the Tor Browser) is based on, to have similar protections. However, doing so would require at least some level of technical savvy, as you have to know which switches to flip and have the confidence that you\u2019ve caught everything. <\/p>\n

The idea with Mullvad is to take care of all of that for you; you can just open it and feel reasonably confident that you\u2019re not particularly easy to track. \u201cDeveloping this browser with Mullvad is about providing people with more privacy options for everyday browsing and to challenge the current business model of exploiting people\u2019s behavioral data,\u201d said Isabela Fernandes, executive director of The Tor Project, who is quoted in a press release.<\/p>\n

To be clear, these measures are less helpful if you\u2019re trying to hide from government and law enforcement tracking like the NSA, FBI, or parties working for other governments around the world. For anyone with enough resources, there are ways to track internet activity that go well beyond tracking pixels and third-party cookies. <\/p>\n

However, most users don\u2019t feel the need to have that kind of protection, and the truth of the matter is that getting it isn\u2019t convenient. For all its privacy upsides, the standard Tor Browser isn\u2019t necessarily the most user-friendly, with the biggest downside being that it\u2019s often slow as molasses, and sites built for regular web traffic won\u2019t always play nice with it. Those are functions of how it keeps you safe \u2014 by encrypting your traffic and bouncing it all over the world \u2014 but that can be completely overkill if all you\u2019re trying to do is avoid creepy ads.<\/p>\n

According to Pavel Zoneff, a spokesperson for The Tor Project, Mullvad browser is very similar to the Tor Browser, it just connects to the internet through a VPN rather than the Tor network. (It doesn\u2019t have to be Mullvad\u2019s VPN either; if you use another service you trust, or if you have made your own then you can use that.) Mullvad browser also doesn\u2019t offer the Tor browser\u2019s censorship circumnavigation user experience, access to onion sites or services, or \u201ccircuit isolation and the integration with new-identity.\u201d But again, if you don\u2019t know what those things are, it\u2019s probably not a huge concern.<\/p>\n

Mullvad browser will still likely have some usability quirks that you wouldn\u2019t find in Chrome or another mainstream browser. Some websites get cranky about certain privacy settings and won\u2019t work properly, and if you continuously use its cookie-cleaning feature, you may end up having to sign into services more often. But if you\u2019re willing to make those trade-offs for a chance of being more private on the web, it may be a good place to start \u2014 though it\u2019s worth keeping in mind that to hide in a crowd, there actually has to be<\/em> a crowd. If you\u2019re the only person using Mullvad browser, it could be pretty easy to fingerprint you; having less of a fingerprint can still be pretty identifiable if everyone else has one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Mitchell Clark<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Tor Project, the organization behind the anonymous network and browser, is helping launch a privacy-focused browser that\u2019s made to connect to a VPN instead of a decentralized onion network. It\u2019s called the Mullvad browser, named after the Mullvad VPN company it\u2019s partnered with on the project, and it\u2019s available for Windows, Mac, or Linux.The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":625085,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24942,2606,46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-625084","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-privacy-focused","8":"category-projects","9":"category-technology"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}