Thanks Kushal for this handy explainer. It provides so much context and helps all of us take an educated decision.
It is a common observation when visiting torrent sites without VPN that they are not only able to track and display my location with much accuracy, they are also aware of the resolution and cores of my laptop.
Your location is tied with your ip, maybe there are other methods too that I’m unaware of. Other information is accessed from the browser, so if the browser lies to the website they can’t (read as shouldn’t) be able to get it.
Does the same happen even when I use the TOR browser? { use the inbuilt TOR in my brave browser ever since I came to know of Chrome’s bad habits}
Tor browser will be better, you can visit the same website with Tor browser & see what information it gives. Also, brave uses the same core as chrome & contributes to blink monopoly. If you can then use Firefox or better just use TB for browsing hidden services or whatever.
When browsing the onion sites via TOR do we need to always cover our laptop’s camera? Is the threat always looming?
Tor hidden services serve webpages like any other service, so if you feel the need to cover your webcam while surfing the internet then you should cover it. I think the little light beside the webcam is not controlled by software (not sure, it shouldn’t be actually), if that’s the case then you’ll see that led glow when your webcam turns on.
When using TOR, is it advised to close other sessions on our browser i.e. the ones on the regular browser? Can we be tracked by any site because we have multiple sessions on?
First thing that you need to understand is your threat model, not everyone needs to strictly use Tor browser. I used to run a daemon and connect with my regular browser, sure it’s not as good as Tor browser but it’s fine for my threat model.
Also websites you visit using say TB cannot know what you’re doing on other browsers (should’nt be able to). If you are doing something that will put you in danger then read the docs at torproject.org. It’s totally fine to use Tor for normal browsing, it helps the project.
EFF has some documents regarding this: https://ssd.eff.org/ & https://sec.eff.org/
3 Likes