 Let's open with the most important thing to take away from this video. Simply switching on incognito mode or private browsing is not enough to keep your data safe online. Also, just because you aren't doing anything illegal doesn't mean that no one is after your personal information and that there's no benefit to staying private. Thing is, guys, these days pretty much everyone and their dog is out to get your browsing data. And that's not tinfoil hat, paranoid delusional stuff. The main reason is that companies and other organizations like political parties want your eyeballs glued to their message. And the data that they get from your behavior online helps by giving them an advantage when they serve up those juicy ads everywhere that you frequent. The good news is that staying private online is actually less difficult than you might think and pretty much anyone can do it. So let's go through some easy strategies, starting with one of our favorites, using a VPN like private internet access. For those of you new to VPNs or virtual private networks, they take in your data, encrypt it, then send it through their network of servers before forwarding it to the destination country of choice. When the VPN sends your data out into the world towards the intended destination, it decrypts the data and makes it look like the data originated from that exit point rather than your computer. So whether you're torrenting or looking up content that might generate embarrassing ads in your browser the next time someone sits down at your computer, we consider a VPN an essential part of staying safe online. With that said, while a VPN does secure your data in some ways, making it so your ISP can't tell what you're doing and allowing you to circumvent most firewall blocks, when your information leaves the VPN network, it's all still there and can be used to track you. So a VPN is just one of the tools in our belt. Now let's talk about the Onion Router or Tor as some of you know it. We've actually covered Tor before, but the summary version goes a little something like this. The Onion Router isn't a physical router like you'd think of plugging in in your home. Rather, it's an internet networking protocol that's integrated into the Tor web browser and it's designed to anonymize the data relayed across it. So it keeps your online activity anonymous by encasing your traffic in multiple layers of encryption, then sending it through a number of nodes that peel back those layers one at a time. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for snoops to see your webmail, search history and other online activity. Now Tor is also imperfect and leaves us vulnerable until our traffic reaches its network. That's why we're using our PIA VPN to mask that initial jump. Now the thing is, using a VPN can actually lead to issues if you are specifically being hunted by some government agency, because your traffic will have a predictable exit point. But for most people whose goal is to thwart more casual surveillance and advertisers, this vulnerability isn't that important. Now, incognito mode, which by the way isn't useless, plus a VPN and Tor is pretty good and probably enough for most people. But since we're going for the ultimate private setup, we're going to take things a step further with our secret weapon. The... Hey. There it is. Super secure password. The Linux-based Tails is the operating system equivalent of your weird uncle after too many drinks. It's designed to forget everything it ever heard or saw. The entire OS is built around the Tor protocol and runs all internet traffic through the Tor network, not just your browser traffic. One of the other key benefits of Tails is that the OS essentially runs off of your computer's RAM. So once you turn off the system, poof, any data that was lingering on it is gone and there's nothing to match your identity to the last browsing session. Another advantage of this solution is that you can take it with you and launch it on nearly any computer with a USB port. So then, now we are ready to browse the web... anonymously. Almost. The first thing you'll probably notice about the Tor browser is how similar it looks to Firefox. And that's not by accident. It's because it is Firefox, just set up to use the Tor protocol. And that's nice because it makes configuring all these little tweaks pretty familiar and straightforward. So in no particular order, regardless of our browser choice, we want to make sure that JavaScript can't run, we want to install the privacy badger extension to stop trackers and provide ad blocking, and we want to set our default search engine to DuckDuckGo for what I hope would be fairly obvious reasons. So then, now we are fully ready to both browse the web and stick it to the man at the same time. Let's do a few tests here to see what that looks like. So we've got two machines for our side-by-side test. A completely vanilla one running Windows and using Google, and then our Tails Linux one with the Tor browser. Now, something to note is that we're not actually using a VPN on either of these machines because here we're trying to get a representation of the worst case scenario. And here, PIA actually doesn't recommend using their VPN from within Tails, although they do have a free proxy included with your account, which they do say could be a good idea depending on what it is you're trying to achieve. So let's go ahead and search for Expedia. Okay, first hit is Expedia.com. This one, Expedia.ca. So immediately, our location has been anonymized, and also Expedia blocked us from even accessing their site. That's cute. Did we know that was going to happen? No, I didn't expect him to block Tor. Expedia blocks Tor. Let's try a different provider. We can't tell if you're a human. I'm human. Expedia.co.uk let me through. It's like pretty sure I'm a bot, hey? Taking it's sweet time. Three freaking captures. No, we're good. All right. Let's find a frigging flight here. New York departing tomorrow. Okay. Let's do a quick search in my dirge. Now, we haven't actually been researching flights and hotels, so there may not be much benefit in terms of pricing to anonymizing any of this, but there's only one way to find out. All right, so we're looking at $699 Canadian round trip and 347 pounds. Let's do a quick conversion there. 556. I just saved $145. This is the same damn flight. It's over $100 cheaper. Includes taxes and fees. Including taxes and fees. Yep. Yep. Apples to apples. You heard it here first. Expedia hates Canadians. Now, let's do another fun little test. Let's go to whatismyip.com. That is in fact our IP. And over here, my public IP is some nonsense I've never seen or heard of before, and I'm apparently based in Bessel, B-S-C-H. Where the devil is that? Switzerland. Now, let's do another fun little test. Let's go on a popular shopping website, like say newegg.com. Now, let's shop for, let's say, video cards. Maybe an ASRock Phantom, Radeon 7. What's a site with really, really obnoxious ads? What's that one based in Australia that's like super obnoxious? Tweaktown? Tweaktown. That's it. Thanks, Luke. No problem. All right. And let's have a look at what kind of ads are lurking for us on the page. Ho-ho! What do we have here? Vancouver to London, Vancouver to New Delhi, Vancouver to Lima, and Vancouver to San Salvador. Shockingly, they didn't manage to come up with any graphics cards ads, which was sort of what I was going for here, but I think we've made our point. As for this, well, it looks like they're not getting any ad revenue from us, which of course we feel pretty badly about as an ad-supported enterprise ourselves. But at the very least, we are not being tracked across the internet, which is the only reason that we enabled the ad blocking on this particular one in the first place. You can, of course, anonymize your browsing significantly without blocking ads altogether. Just saying. So for fun, we're going to disable both Privacy Badger and U-Block Origin and reload this page. So there's our ads. But as you can see, they are completely irrelevant. So we've got some Scarlett audio interfaces in whatever language this is, an ad for the Stream Deck Accel. That's in English at least. An ad for Corsair's Hydrox series liquid cooling. So there you go. So that was a pretty compelling demonstration of the benefits of private browsing, but it has some clear disadvantages as well. Now this machine on the right is actually faster than the one on the left, but you guys might have noticed that browsing from within Tails using the Tor browser was slow as hell. That's because the more hops you go through, the more latency you're adding to the connection. Also, some of the creature comforts that we've gotten used to on the modern web, things like shopping carts that remember all the things that you added to them, or websites that remember that you logged into them so you don't have to enter your password every time. That stuff ain't going to work over here. Also, something to bear in mind, guys, is that no matter what you do, it is going to be imperfect. This was a fairly basic guide, and privacy browsing is a rabbit hole and a half. Furthermore, even on a properly set up machine, while you're browsing and searching and almost all of your internet usage might be basically invisible, nothing is bulletproof, because the weakest point in the entire chain exists between the keyboard and the chair. You and I are human, and we are nothing if not creatures of habit, and if someone is trying to find you, your habits are likely to end up being the thing that gives you away. With all of that said, though, for the vast majority of use cases, following either of the methods that we laid out here should obscure your data footprint enough to make it nearly useless for advertisers and other parties. Speaking of advertisers, this video is brought to you by PIA. Private Internet Access supports a variety of VPN protocols and types of encryption and authentication, allowing you to dial in the level of privacy that you need. They've got apps for Windows, Mac OS, Android, Linux, and Google Chrome, and you can connect up to five devices at once using a single account. Their apps include DNS leak protection and IPv6 leak protection, as well as their Internet kill switch feature, which blocks all traffic if the VPN becomes disconnected unexpectedly. So check it out today at lmg.gg slash PIA Linus 2. We're going to have that linked down below. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the video description link below. Also down there is our merch store. It has cool shirts like this one. Join our community forum. It looks like that. Or like that if you're in the Tor browser. Wap.