Anonymous Browsing Guide in 2024: Avoid Online Tracking

Cookies are small files stored on your device that a website can access to learn information about you, your device and your browsing activity. Websites usually need to use some first-party cookies to function properly or provide simple conveniences, such as keeping you logged in to your account.

However, websites can also host third-party cookies from other websites, allowing them to track your activity across multiple sites. Thanks to the GDPR, most websites now require you to give express permission for the use of third-party cookies, though adherence to this practice varies by region. You should always make sure to reject third-party cookies when visiting a website.

Every device on the internet is assigned its own IP address, which serves as a unique identifier for that connection. Most websites log IP addresses to gain information on where their user is visiting from, as well as which ISP they’re using. 

An IP address can reveal your approximate location. If you’re connecting from a business or using a VPN, it can identify which business or VPN service you’re utilizing.

Moreover, while an IP address can’t identify a person directly, it can be used alongside other collected data to create a more detailed profile and reveal your identity.

Originally a fraud prevention method, device fingerprinting can reveal information about your device, like the device type, operating system, hardware configuration, IP address, time zone, screen resolution, installed fonts and drivers, and web browsers. While these data points may be insignificant on their own, they can identify a device with very high accuracy when combined. 

Social media widgets are the “like” and “share” buttons you see on some websites. Even if you never interact with them, merely loading them onto the page will make them connect to the social media site’s servers, revealing that your device has accessed the website.

Pixel tracking involves embedding a tiny, transparent 1×1 pixel image into a webpage or email. This technique tracks when the image (known as a tracking pixel) is loaded from the server onto the user’s display. 

Depending on where the tracking pixel is located on the website or email, it can reveal when a website was accessed, if and when an email was opened, or whether the user viewed a certain part of the page.

Web beacons are similar to pixel tracking as they also involve embedding a transparent 1×1 pixel image into a website or email. These beacons can be used with JavaScript to provide more detailed analytics by running certain scripts whenever the web beacon is loaded.

Analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, provide website owners with valuable data on user behavior across their sites. These tools typically work by utilizing JavaScript tags to analyze how a user interacts with a webpage, how long they stay on it and how far down they scroll, along with other trackable behaviors.

Using a privacy-focused browser can go a long way toward preventing cookies and browser fingerprinting. As you can read in our browser fingerprinting guide, we’re fans of Safari’s anti-tracking option, which makes your hardware configuration seem more generic. We also recommend Firefox’s enhanced tracking prevention and Brave’s fingerprint blocking.

If you use Google Search or Microsoft Bing, there’s nothing stopping their parent companies from analyzing your search history. In contrast, anonymous search engines don’t store user information or search data, and they often use proxy systems to submit searches on the user’s behalf. 

One popular private search engine is DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t personalize search results or collect advertising data. Startpage is another example that goes a step further by routing your queries through a proxy for added anonymity.

A VPN is an indispensable piece of software for the privacy-minded. It encrypts your web traffic, making it unreadable to anyone trying to snoop, including your ISP. A VPN also routes your traffic through its own servers and communicates with the internet on your behalf, masking your IP address and identity. 

Due to its traffic routing properties, a VPN can make you appear to be located in a different place. This allows you to bypass censorship, access content that’s unavailable locally and even get better deals on online services. Popular examples are NordVPN, Surfshark and ExpressVPN, which are all on our list of the best VPN services.

Proxy servers are similar to VPNs — they route your traffic, and they interface between you and the internet. However, there’s one major difference: They don’t encrypt your traffic. This makes proxy servers unreliable for privacy purposes and even for accessing online content, as it’s fairly easy for a website to recover your true IP address while you’re using one. 

The Tor Browser is best known for being the gateway to the deep web, but it can also serve as a private browser that prevents tracking. Tor Browser uses what’s called onion routing — a process where your connection is encrypted and routed through a series of volunteer-operated nodes.

In theory, this makes Tor highly effective for online anonymity. However, its volunteer-based nature means it’s much more susceptible to traffic manipulation, especially if the browser happens to connect to a malicious end node. You can learn more about the Tor network in our guide that compares VPNs, proxies and Tor.

Most mainstream email providers like Gmail and Outlook aren’t exactly privacy-friendly. Thankfully, some private email services offer end-to-end encryption to ensure that only the intended recipient can read the messages you send. Two popular examples are Proton Mail and Tutanota.

TikTok lets you create a private profile and set several preferences to decrease the visibility of your account. You’ll find all of these in the “privacy” tab of your profile settings.

1. Set your account to “private” and disable your activity status.
2. Disable social media contact syncing and suggesting your account to others.
3. Limit interactions with your account by disabling downloads, hiding your “following” and “like” lists, and disabling “profile view” and “post view” history.

LinkedIn offers several visibility settings that let you limit the information people can see. However, this might be a double-edged sword if you’re looking for job opportunities and want to put yourself out there. Whatever your circumstances, these steps can help you browse more anonymously on LinkedIn, and you can find them all in the “visibility” tab in your settings.

1. Switch your “profile viewing” setting to “private mode” to limit what information is available to others when you view their profile, and disable “page visit visibility” for organizations.
2. Limit “email visibility” to only yourself and disable email address exporting.
3. Disable “connection visibility” and “follow visibility.”
4. Set your “last name visibility” to the initial only.
5. Disallow profile data exporting.
6. Disable the “profile discovery and visibility off LinkedIn” setting, including your phone number and email searches.
7. Limit the visibility of your LinkedIn activity.

Reddit’s “anonymous browsing” option lets you scroll through the platform without an account. To turn on anonymous browsing, just select your profile picture in the top-right corner, then select your username. This lets you switch to a different account or access anonymous browsing. 

Note that while you’re in anonymous browsing mode, you can’t comment, vote on posts or do any other action that requires an account. Also, much like using Incognito mode in Chrome, Reddit still tracks your browsing behavior, so you’re not truly anonymous.

Reddit doesn’t allow for much privacy customization, though you can still adjust some settings within your account menu to make your browsing a bit more private.

1. Disable location tracking.
2. Remove your gender information.
3. Disconnect your Google and Apple accounts.