Today, I'm turning toward the tools of getting privacy and freedom online. Whatever might be going on in the legacy world, I believe we should seek the ideal and work to improve what's possible. This begins with finding a more private way to use the internet. Giving up some convenience to improve freedom is I'd say a good trade.
Are you tired of being tracked all the time but don't know what you can do it about it? Are you willing to spend an evening improving your privacy online?
In this article, you'll learn how to get a high level of privacy online. You'll be able to visit many websites without ads following you around and read what you like without alerting your internet provider and government that you are waking up.
The tool we're going to use is called Tails. Tails is an operating system that includes Tor for anonymous browsing and other tools for anonymous chat and email. If you're not sure what an operating system is, that's what Windows and Mac OS are. An operating system makes your computer work at a basic level so you can run apps, web browsers and other programs. Since Tails is an operating system it can be comprehensive about setting up privacy for you.
Before you start, you'll need a computer of course. It can be an old Windows laptop or desktop or it could be a linux box. The new M1 Macs don't work, neither does a Raspberry Pi or mobile device.
Then you'll need two usb flash drives of at least 16gb capacity. This process may take an hour or two, but if you're here you probably believe the enhanced privacy is worth it.
To start visit https://tails.boum.org/ and click Get Tails 4.27 (or latest version).
The website will ask which operating system you're installing Tails from. This is necessary because you would use a different program to put Tails on your flash drives if you're using Windows, Linux or Mac.
So click on the button for your operating system and follow the instructions. Leave this article open as I'm putting an overview here, but when in doubt follow the directions from the Tails website. The first step will be to download Tails, which can take a while since the software is 1.2 GB.
Then you'll verify the 1.2 GB file, which ensures that what you downloaded wasn't modified to be less secure in some way.
Next, you'll install a program (like balenaEtcher or GNOME Disks) to write the 1.2gb file to the USB flash drive in the correct way. It won't work if you just copy the big file over, the files inside it have to be unpacked so that your computer can boot from the drive later. You can do this once, but if you want to have a backup of your Persistent data, then do it with the other drive as well while you're at it.
Once the file has been written to at least one USB flash drive, you'll restart your computer and make sure it boots from USB flash drive. This can be tricky because computers vary in how they are made to boot from anything but their internal hard drive. Some web searching may be involved. Often you have to hit a button like F10 or Del right on the very first screen you see after turning the computer on.
When your computer boots from Tails, you'll see a black menu that proceeds after a few seconds, then a grey screen for a minute with a few white dots showing progress and a more familiar looking that lets you attach Persistent storage and configure other options. I'm not going to cover Persistent storage except to recommend that you set it up so your Tails remembers your Wifi password and any files you might want to save.
Once the Tails software is booted up on your computer, you'll need to connect to wifi using the menu on the upper right. Not long after, a window should pop up that connects you to Tor and then opens up a Tor browser.
We're done. The Tor browser is like Chrome or Safari but with a high level of privacy. Try it out by visiting some websites.so share it as much as you like.
Copyright is for the legacy world but if you care this is licensed CC0.