Concise List of Privacy Options Please

Hello-

I'm just trying to get a grasp on what my options are for maintaining privacy/anonymity while conducting my online activities. I have been a XBVPN user in the past, and just haven't renewed my subscription in 3 years. While trying to search the threads, I have seen a LOT of conflicting opinions and verbal affronts. While the opinions are good discussion, I find myself wanting to claw my eyes out at times as the affronts just add more garbage through which I must sort.

So, if you can, please offer advice or concerns in a constructive manner. Thanks in advance!

Anonymous activities that I am interested in now:

- Blogging
- Email
- Web Browsing

Other anonymous activities that may interest me in the future:
- online payments

So I guess I am trying to figure out if VPN's, Tor, Virtual machines, LiveCD's, etc. can help me in any way.

I liked XBvpn because I thought I could just turn it on, and my local administrators couldn't see my passed the VPN. Does anyone have any suggestions? It would be nice to find a setup where I can do the most activity online and not have anything come back to me, but I didn't know if that was just running a LiveCD and finding an open home router.

Perhaps there are more questions I should be considering? Any help is appreciated!

 

That's what I've been seeking here for years.

Bottom line: It's virtually impossible for users to assess claims made by VPN providers.

Anyone can test anti-malware software, and publish the results. And anyone can test VPNs re usability, speed and leakiness (via whatismyip.org, decloak.net, grc.com/dns, etc).

However, attempts to "ask harder" pretty quickly become attacks that violate most any ISP's/VPN's TOS. I suspect that some VPN providers do probe each others' systems. But they don't post to Wilders about it.

What's the answer?

 

Well if private or even open source products are difficult to measure, perhaps talking about specific actions or ways of connecting to/using the internet would be better (even if it may be a broader approach).

For example, what about connecting to open AP's in a neighborhood, then using TOR or something similar? Even if someone can track everything back to the AP, it still wouldn't divulge much I guess.

So maybe it wouldn't matter how anonymous the whole chain of connections are as long as it doesn't trace back completely.