At least, that’s the optimist’s view of how that data is used - I’m sure you can think of many examples of how your online usage profiles can be used against you in much more nefarious ways. Such profiles are then sold, aggregated with matching profiles collected from other services, and then monetized by ad networks. In any case, odds are that someone somewhere is assembling an online profile on you based on the sites you visit and how much time you spend on each of them. If you’re using a VPN service ( as you should be ), then your IP can be mapped to your VPN provider, and then they are the ones who can map it to your household. If you’re browsing from home, then your IP can be directly mapped to your household. The name “Tor” stands for “The Onion Router” and it is a technology created to combat online tracking and other privacy violations.Įverything you do on the Internet leaves a set of digital footprints in every piece of equipment that your IP packets traverse: all of the switches, routers, load balancers and destination websites log the IP address from which your session originated and the IP address of the internet resource you are accessing (and often its hostname, even when using HTTPS ). You have probably heard about the Tor project before, but just in case you haven’t, here’s a very quick summary.

However, if you would like to put it to good use without sacrificing too much of your time or resources, you can turn your old Raspberry Pi into a perfectly functioning Tor relay node. This is not to say that there aren’t cool things you can do with one of these, but between work and other commitments, I just never seem to find the right time for some good old nerding out. After all, unless you’re a robotics enthusiast, you probably don’t have that much use for a computer with a pretty slow processor and 256 megabytes of RAM. If you’re anything like me, you probably got yourself a first- or second-generation Raspberry Pi board when they first came out, played with it for a while, but then shelved it and mostly forgot about it.

Tor exit router