'Onion sites are considered to be about anonymity, but really they offer two more features: enforced discretion (your employer or ISP cannot see what you are browsing, not even what site, and you have to be using Tor in the first place to get there) and trust,' Muffett explains. one that perhaps your peers and/or the Government does not want you to be accessing.'Īnd that's why organisations such as the CIA, the New York Times and Facebook have onion versions. 'This is like the same promise as end-to-end-encrypted messaging, but for web browsing and other forms of communication, but unlike WhatsApp or Signal where it's definitely your best friend or lover at the other end of the connection, instead it's your favourite website. That central control allows for censorship, as by interrupting that lookup a site can effectively be banned from the web - this is why Turkish protesters were spraypainting IP addresses on walls in 2014, to tell others how to access Google directly without going via a DNS server. On the regular web, domains such as are translated into their actual IP addresses via the domain name system (DNS). When people go on about the so-called dark web, they're usually talking about onion sites, which aren't searchable via Google or accessible via standard browsers.

Tor Browser is the least-worst option for protecting your privacy in a web browsing context, in its highest security mode.' What is the dark web? 'It has one of the worst security risk profiles – 'allow arbitrary third parties to run code on my computer' – coupled with protocols that were never designed to protect metadata.

'Web browsing is hostile to privacy and security,' she says.

That may seem an extreme way to browse the web, but such protections are increasingly worth considering, says Sarah Jamie Lewis, executive director of the Open Privacy Research Society. Tor refers to 'the onion router', which is a network that bounces your traffic through random nodes, wrapping it in encryption each time, making it difficult to track it's managed and accessed via the Tor browser.

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