can you go fully anonymous online?

[adarw]

i dont have anything to hide nor am i trying to do anything illegal, but i am curious, is there a way to go fully anonymous? if not, in what way can we go "more" anonymous.

[adarw]

1 minute ago, James Evens said:

No.

At the end there are behavior pattern. One might even be able to match this profile to your anonymous dark net forum due to lingual analysis.

i kinda wish i had something cool like that XD, what if i used an algorithm that changes my word structure for different places?

[suedseefrucht]

8 minutes ago, adarw said:

in what way can we go "more" anonymous

I feel a bit stupid, trying to explain something to someone with so much more experience on this forum than me

I think the main fingerprint is the IP.

You can use a tunnel to act like you would be an IP from a different country, but the tunnel provider will know you.
 

The best thing, I can imgagine would be a free public wifi. The wifi router will only know your MAC address and if you buy a used notebook in person, no one will know, which MAC address you bought.

[Dreckssackblase]

11 minutes ago, suedseefrucht said:

I feel a bit stupid, trying to explain something to someone with so much more experience on this forum than me

I think the main fingerprint is the IP.

You can use a tunnel to act like you would be an IP from a different country, but the tunnel provider will know you.
 

The best thing, I can imgagine would be a free public wifi. The wifi router will only know your MAC address and if you buy a used notebook in person, no one will know, which MAC address you bought.

Every Website you talk to receives your Browser fingerprint though, which includes stuff like display size / resolution, processor, OS and Browser Version and depending on how unique your setup is, you could be identified through that.

[suedseefrucht]

20 minutes ago, adarw said:

anonymous

To whom?
You can be anonymous on facebook to other users by using a fantasy name.

[Juular]

20 minutes ago, suedseefrucht said:

I think the main fingerprint is the IP.

There's TOR (which is speculated to be 'cracked' by law enforcement now), and I2P (which is not 100% safe if you're a target of very high magnitude either) to hide your IP and traffic by routing it through multiple points and otherwise heavily obfuscating your network activity by mixing in unrelated traffic (from other users). And your system / browser fingerprinting can be mitigated by specialized software like Tor Browser and Tails OS. But in the end, if your presence on both clearnet (regular internet) and darknet (TOR / I2P) is high enough - you can be tracked by behavioral and lingual analysis, or rather your clearnet identity can be matched with your darkweb one, if you've bothered the law enforcement enough to warrant deploying this kind of operation. Whether that would hold up in court is another question, but that's a start, so they can then deploy other kinds of targeted attacks at you specifically.

[suedseefrucht]

Just now, Dreckssackblase said:

Every Website you talk to receives your Browser fingerprint though, which includes stuff like display size / resolution, processor, OS and Browser Version and depending on how unique your setup is, you could be identified through that.

Anonymous to whom is an important question.

I dont see a way, how the government should know, that this browser with this screen size belongs to you.
But google might be able to put special ads for your device.

[Dreckssackblase]

22 minutes ago, suedseefrucht said:

Anonymous to whom is an important question.

I dont see a way, how the government should know, that this browser with this screen size belongs to you.
But google might be able to put special ads for your device.

just wanted to point out, that when you use the same PC for like online banking and then anonymised connections through something like a VPN that you could still be tracked somewhat, depending on how unique your setup is. If you run a fringe Linux Distro and a 164hz ultrawide 5k monitor with some rarer processor like a threadripper, youll be pretty identifieable to any big presence in the internet like amazon which hosts huge parts of the web on AWS.

[HanZie82]

Also, there is many hardware in a computer that has unique identifiers.
So you'll never be really anonymous.

Unless you have a live OS on USB and go to a random library to work from there.
But nobody would do something that shady.

[Lightwreather]

16 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

live OS

tailsOS /s

[adarw]

1 hour ago, Dreckssackblase said:

Every Website you talk to receives your Browser fingerprint though, which includes stuff like display size / resolution, processor, OS and Browser Version and depending on how unique your setup is, you could be identified through that.

thats true but ive been wanting to know is there a way not to give them that info?

1 hour ago, Juular said:

There's TOR (which is speculated to be 'cracked' by law enforcement now), and I2P (which is not 100% safe if you're a target of very high magnitude either) to hide your IP and traffic by routing it through multiple points and otherwise heavily obfuscating your network activity by mixing in unrelated traffic (from other users). And your system / browser fingerprinting can be mitigated by specialized software like Tor Browser and Tails OS. But in the end, if your presence on both clearnet (regular internet) and darknet (TOR / I2P) is high enough - you can be tracked by behavioral and lingual analysis, or rather your clearnet identity can be matched with your darkweb one, if you've bothered the law enforcement enough to warrant deploying this kind of operation. Whether that would hold up in court is another question, but that's a start, so they can then deploy other kinds of targeted attacks at you specifically.

thats fair, thanks for the info!

 

 

[williamcll]

chrome explains this pretty easily

 

Also don't forget the FBI wiretapping outside your house.

[Mark Kaine]

4 hours ago, Dreckssackblase said:

Every Website you talk to receives your Browser fingerprint though, which includes stuff like display size / resolution, processor, OS and Browser Version and depending on how unique your setup is, you could be identified through that.

… why though?  couldnt that be randomized and faked or something? i think thats part of what OP is asking.

 

[Levent]

1 minute ago, Mark Kaine said:

… why though?  couldnt that be randomized and faked or something? i think thats part of what OP is asking.

"User fingerprint" also has to randomized. Humans have A LOT of patterns that are not visible straight away to themselves. How you click, where you visit, what typos you makes, how fast you type etc ANYTHING can be used to identify you.

[Dreckssackblase]

3 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

… why though?  couldnt that be randomized and faked or something? i think thats part of what OP is asking.

You can try for sure, but a new Proof of concept that was released recently, people could be identified by running an opengl enable benchmark in the background and then fingerprinting the GPU based on boosting behaviour an voltages, so unless you want to write some code to randomize your GPUs BIOS aswell then you might still be trackable if some bad actor really wants to.

[YellowJersey]

Not really. You can reduce data collection and tracking, but you can never get rid of it entirely.

[tkitch]

You can help (a little) as mentioned before:

"Burner" Laptop.  Disable Onboard Networking.  Use USB WiFi nuggets as "Disposable" MAC addresses.

Connect at public WIFI spots.  Starbucks, Dunks, Etc.

Add a VPN / TOR / Other level of obfuscation

Bootable USB OS that doesn't save changes

Don't use social media, forums, etc.  Those are super easy to trace back to a person.

Don't log into any google or other accounts you've ever accessed at your home computer.

 

 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

6 hours ago, suedseefrucht said:

The best thing, I can imgagine would be a free public wifi. The wifi router will only know your MAC address and if you buy a used notebook in person, no one will know, which MAC address you bought.

or you could change it?

macchanger on linux can give you a random mac adress

[suedseefrucht]

35 minutes ago, Helpful Tech Wiard said:

macchanger on linux can give you a random mac adress

Yeah, right.
Even though it has to be unique in the network, you can probably guess one, which is not in the network yet ^^

[Helpful Tech Witch]

1 minute ago, suedseefrucht said:

Yeah, right.
Even though it has to be unique in the network, you can probably guess one, which is not in the network yet ^^

hopedully it wouldnt take mo-re than 2 tries, there are like 280 trillion mac adresses

[da na]

6 hours ago, Dreckssackblase said:

just wanted to point out, that when you use the same PC for like online banking and then anonymised connections through something like a VPN that you could still be tracked somewhat, depending on how unique your setup is. If you run a fringe Linux Distro and a 164hz ultrawide 5k monitor with some rarer processor like a threadripper, youll be pretty identifieable to any big presence in the internet like amazon which hosts huge parts of the web on AWS.

So whenever I take my Pentium 4, 1024x768, XP SP3 system online to scrounge up some old freeware I'm easily trackable since no one else on this planet has that configuration? Hmmm...

 

But yes, due to things such as that, even if you never reveal your name, location, even IP (from VPN) online you are still traceable to some extent. People may not be able to find your house or anything but a general profile of you is still being created and held on servers. 

[Obioban]

Full hardcore:

Email: None

Web browser: TOR

DNS: 1.1.1.1

 

Far more viable/livable:

Email: proton

Web browser: Safari

iCloud secure relate

1.1.1.1

 

Either way, don't use any google services or log into google anywhere. Same of facebook, etc. Don't use SMS. Disable cookies. Don't use public wifi.

 

Macs all identify as the same computer, so can't really be profiled in that manner.

[Dreckssackblase]

57 minutes ago, Helpful Tech Wiard said:

macchanger on linux can give you a random mac adress

There's even a just checkbox in Android and Windows 10 for using a random mac for WiFi connections.

It's a pretty common privacy feature.

[RejZoR]

8 hours ago, James Evens said:

No.

At the end there are behavior pattern. One might even be able to match this profile to your anonymous dark net forum due to lingual analysis.

Unless you make intentional mistakes

[IPD]

11 hours ago, suedseefrucht said:

I feel a bit stupid, trying to explain something to someone with so much more experience on this forum than me

I think the main fingerprint is the IP.

You can use a tunnel to act like you would be an IP from a different country, but the tunnel provider will know you.
 

The best thing, I can imgagine would be a free public wifi. The wifi router will only know your MAC address and if you buy a used notebook in person, no one will know, which MAC address you bought.

Until they simply take the timestamps of when you were online and compare them to CCTV footage in/around the area where the wifi was--and match your comings/goings, thereby being able to likely get a facial ID, license plate, vehicle description, etc.  Even worse if the CCTV footage is inside the building with wifi--not just outside in some parking lot.