HOW TO BE INVISIBLE ONLINE

Robert Irvine recommends the best new ways to stay anonymous online by switching to more effective anti-tracking tools

- Robert Irvine

THREATS TO OUR ONLINE PRIVACY are constantly evolving. Advertising companies are finding new ways to track us, websites are developing new methods of collecting our data, and even the operating systems we use every day like Windows 11 are now trying to sell us something as we just go about our work and tasks.

This makes it more difficult than ever to preserve your anonymity as you browse the web, and essential to ensure you’re using reliable methods to combat the latest threats. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of privacy tools, and names such as Brave, DuckDuckGo, and NordVPN will be familiar to most readers. But in the past year, lots of new options have emerged that potentially offer better protection than the software and services you currently use, while existing tools have added powerful new privacy features.

To keep you updated on these developments, we have rounded up the best new private browsers, VPNs, search engines, and more to keep you invisible in the face of rising demand for your personal information. We’ve focused on boosting your privacy on your PC, because staying anonymous on your phone is a feature in itself, but we do cover new options in some service’s mobile apps.

First, however, we explode the most common privacy myths to explain why your browser’s anti-tracking settings are no longer sufficient.

Private-browsing mode makes you anonymous