The anonymity tower · the atrium

Private browsers: the tower, floor by floor

This is the entrance to the anonymity tower: private browsers, proxies, fingerprinting, and the machinery that recognises you before you have logged in to anything at all.

One idea runs through every floor and it is worth having before you climb. Anonymity is not a setting you switch on. It is the absence of things that identify you, there are far more of them than most people expect, and they do not fail all at once — they fail one at a time, quietly, usually because of something you did rather than something the software got wrong. The floors go through them in the order they actually matter, which is not the order the marketing puts them in.

The most common mistake this tower exists to correct is a single word. People say private when they mean one of three completely different things: not being tracked by advertisers, not being seen by whoever runs the network, or not being identifiable at all. Those need different tools, and the third one is a different discipline rather than a different product. Every floor says which of the three it is talking about, in the first paragraph.

Three levels, and you are on the first. The atrium lists the floors; a floor covers one subject completely and holds the shorter guides underneath. Nothing here is more than three clicks from the front door, and every floor links back to this one.

There is also a question of proportion that the tower tries to keep in view. For most people reading this, the realistic goal is not to disappear — it is to stop being followed around by advertising, to keep a browsing history out of the hands of a company that sells it, and to know which of the two is actually happening. Those goals are achievable in an afternoon with free tools, and three of the floors above cover them completely. The rest of the building is for the smaller number of people whose requirement is genuinely stronger, and it says so rather than selling the same advice twice at different volumes.

What this tower will not do

It will not promise invisibility. Nothing sold to consumers delivers it, and the products that imply otherwise are selling a feeling. The honest ceiling for an ordinary person is being harder to follow and cheaper to lose interest in, which is worth a great deal and is not the same thing.

It will not tell somebody at genuine risk that a browser is enough. If the consequence of being identified is serious, the answer involves habits, separation and other people’s advice, not a download. That floor exists, it is short, and most of it is a list of places better equipped than we are.

And it will not carry affiliate links, which in this category means declining the browsers and services that pay best for exactly this kind of page.

One last thing about how these floors are written. Claims about what a browser blocks are taken from the maker’s own documentation with the date attached, and wherever it is possible the floor ends with a test you can run yourself instead of a claim you have to believe. This subject attracts confident writing and very little verification, and the difference between the two is the only thing that makes a page like this worth keeping. What holds instead is simple: no product on these floors is sold as invisibility, and no floor carries an affiliate link.