What is Tor browser?

With the increase in usage of internet services around the globe, the tracking of users has become a major problem. Almost every website you visit on the internet is tracking you for what can be a variety of reasons. Some websites use your data to show you targeted ads, while some may use your data and preferences to target you with spam and irrelevant posts.

This increases the need for user privacy on the internet more than ever. Many protocols have been introduced to protect users' privacy and data on the internet. However, almost all of these protocols provide data privacy, but they fail to provide complete anonymity over the internet.

The Tor Browser is a web browser that provides security and anonymity over the internet. However, before understanding the tor browser better, we will first discuss a traditional browser.

What is a traditional browser?

Traditional browsers are applications we can use to view and interact with the world wide web (www). Some of these browsers do provide data security over the internet by using different protocols such as end-to-end encryption. However, anyone on the internet who's recording our online activity (tracking data packets from our machine to the recipient machine) can link us (sender) to the person/entity that we are talking to (recipient). Thus, violating a key principle of anonymity provides sender and recipient unlinkability.

Some of the most popular traditional web browsers are:

What is Tor browser?

Every request generated on the Tor browser is routed through multiple machines/computers (also known as relays) and is wrapped in multiple layers of encryption. Anyone monitoring the internet traffic cannot link the sender and the receiver, thus providing anonymity. All the entities/machines on the network form an anonymity set. A greater number of users increases the anonymity set, thus increasing the anonymity of every user of the tor browser.