Admittedly, I haven’t used the browser a lot. The reason being is that there are some hidden issues with trying to maintain privacy. Today, I will talk about some of my observations.

  1. Many websites are tracking your IP address. When you try to access ‘anonymously’, you are denied access at all. Tor claims that the resolution is re-establish a new VPN connection and try again but I have not ever been successful getting onto Craigslist with Tor. Other sites like newspapers give you three free tastes, but when you come in anonymously you are also denied.

2. Privacy works on every screen. So for example, I selected my store so that I could check inventory but after a page refresh so does your store selection. I haven’t played with it enough to sort of get the rhythm of things so it might work if you do things in the right order, but I could see that action getting old if you were looking for something in particular.

3. There is some behavior that I might describe as ‘buggy’. Honestly, I don’t know if it is a service denial or some sort of technical issue. Because of the number of hops, and obscurity, pages are often very slow to load as well. We are talking minutes sometimes for search results to paint images. This is in addition to all of the other gyrations to setup for clearing of cache.

I am not in love with the Tor push to use Duck Duck Go as a search engine either. While they claim to protect privacy, they also got caught manipulating results in favor of pro Ukraine/Anti Russia results. That is simply against my values. The options are pretty meager otherwise, Twitter, Youtube or Wikipedia? Those are not search engines for the entire web to my knowledge. I have switched to Yahoo for now.

I have spoke in the past about my desire for things to just work. I am not going to expend the patience to keep reconnecting or rerouting for a low probability of someone stitching together data on me. Always the surest way to go is to not participate. I know that isn’t always preferable, but lets be honest this world didn’t exist 30 years ago so some selective participation might be healthy.

End Your Programming Routine: I haven’t completely given up on Tor, but the chances are low that it will work out for me. Unfortunately, as the tracking gets tighter and better, I just don’t see this mechanism working well. It is probably time to keep working on finding a service rather than something free. I think it is a good idea that cant keep up against stronger technology.