And even Cloudflare’s VPN Warp does that, by design, because its focus is protection from local adversaries.

Some people still use HTTPS and SOCKS proxies, but those are iffy, because they may leak users’ IP addresses to sites. VPN Services and Anonymous ProxiesĪnyway, such intermediaries are generally called “anonymous proxies”. That is, we must compartmentalize our online personas from our meatspace identities. So it’s best to avoid metadata that creates associations with our meatspace identities or locations. Even then, metadata that’s required for addressing and transport can’t be hidden. However, they can still see content and metadata, unless you use apps with end-to-end encryption. It also hides your ISP-assigned IP address from remote adversaries. That protects almost everything from local adversaries, except for time and traffic pattern, and of course the IP address of the intermediary. And all traffic between our devices and the intermediary must be securely encrypted. OK, so how can we fully hide content, metadata and IP addresses?īasically, there must be an intermediary. Although apps with end-to-end encryption will hide content, and some metadata, they don’t hide local or remote IP addresses.

And remote adversaries can still see content and metadata, and your ISP-assigned IP address. However, your ISP and other local adversaries can still see IP addresses that you access, and all communication content and metadata. But now, at least, it’s feasible with the Librem 5 and PinePhone.

While that’s a typical professional setup for broadband, virtually nobody does it for smartphones. That helps prevent leakage of information about your identity and location, and also protects your devices from compromise by external adversaries. Instead, you connect them through a standalone modem/router using Ethernet, and interpose a hardware firewall between the modem/router and your devices. Basically, you don’t connect devices directly to the Internet. The first step is securing your Internet connection. Online privacy and anonymity depend on preventing your ISP and other local adversaries from seeing communication content or metadata, and on preventing remote adversaries from seeing information about your identity or location.

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