5 Ways to Download Digital Media Anonymously
It is hard to stay anonymous when you are online. Trackers have a lot of ways to find your location once you access their websites or download movies, songs, applications, videos, and others. The most practical way to escape visibility online is to stay offline. However, life becomes more creative and resourceful these days.
You can now hide your online identity from others by using a residential proxy. Proxies allow you to visit websites, watch videos, and listen to songs amid restrictions. These allow you to choose a specific location and appear like you are a real user in the said area. If you do not have a budget to avail yourself of that paid subscription to your favorite movie or song, you possibly ended up at this resort.
As you open your computer, tablet, cellular phone, and phone applications, you are now exploring digital media. Digital media are digital data that can be accessed using your digital media device. Digital media can be through audio, video, a social media site, and others.
Some of these are available for free. Some need payment before you can avail or use them. However, you could not trust all available data on the web. Some hackers moonlight their malicious activities from these available data.
For your business, proxies can make your website scraping possible. Website scraping is extracting content from a certain website. If you are monitoring your business competitors, you may check them once you have activated your chosen ethical proxies with you.
If you want to explore these platforms and download files that you want without others knowing, here are the following ways that you may apply.
Activate Your Chosen Proxy
If you have availed proxies with you, you can activate them by visiting your system preferences. When you are using a macOS, you can check it out with your network settings. However, proxies vary according to your needs.
For instance, if you want to access a website restricted in your area, you can use a residential proxy that enables you to choose a specific location. Further, an anonymous proxy will also ensure all your online activities are no longer traceable by a third party. Consequently, this lowers your internet speed.
Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN)
When downloading files online, you use VPN. VPNs hide your IP address necessary in identifying your location. Aside from that, VPNs hide your browsing activities which disables your internet service provider to access and track any of your online activities. In this case, you may download that favorite song of yours now anonymously.
Encrypt Your Browser
Even your searching tool gets ample data from you. Gladly, you can now encrypt your browser. Encrypting your browser allows you to conceal the file you are downloading into a code. You can try downloading the Tor browser. This browser conceals your activity while accessing the internet.
Even though you use proxy servers for your anonymity, this could not still encrypt your connection. If you encounter a “Not Secure” warning on the web page you are accessing, this means that the said website does not provide you with an encrypted connection.
Delete Cookies and Browser History
Another way to download media yet stays anonymous is to clear cache and cookies from your website. However, clearing cache and cookies only take activities stored in your computer. Once you delete your browsing history, third parties will no longer follow your activities online making them hard to identify your entity. However, this does not permanently delete your files as Google Activity has been storing the data of your online activity.
Conclusion
As of 2019, the United States has over 313 million internet users. At least 50% of these worried about online privacy. Further, 80% believe that the data stored from their online activities are vulnerable to hackers.
There is no absolute protection in your online activities. However, raising awareness and knowing more about security measures like setting up proxies and VPNs in your device would help lessen the risk of data breaches and instill online privacy.
In this case, wherein you want to stay anonymous in downloading media files from the internet, your device should have protection. You must have knowledge of what to click and what to disregard. You are the driver of your activities online.
