Wayne Williams reveals how to keep your downloads completely private, so no-one will ever know which files you’re grabbing from the web
Just as you’re never truly alone when you browse the web – with advertisers, your ISP and even government agencies watching what you do – your downloads are also vulnerable to snoopers. This might not seem too alarming if you’re not illegally downloading copyrighted films or amassing a stash of adult videos, but it’s still an invasion of privacy and allows unknown third parties to build up a picture of your online activities.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to prevent anyone else from knowing which files you’re downloading and have already downloaded, whether you’re using your PC, mobile device or somebody else’s computer.
In this feature, we show you how to use torrenting tools anonymously; download files via a proxy server or a VPN (Virtual Private Network); use a seedbox for super-fast (and totally unidentifiable) downloads; grab files from Usenet; and lock, hide and clean up folders once you’ve finished downloading.
ON THE WEB
Use a proxy server for downloads
A proxy server acts as an intermediary between your computer and the internet. Traffic that’s routed through a proxy appears to come from the server’s IP address, instead of your computer’s. This makes a proxy ideal for downloading files discreetly because it conceals the connection between your PC and the download site. Proxies usually use one of two different protocols – HTTP (for websites) or SOCKS (any kind of internet traffic, including torrents).
There are two types of proxy server: public, which is free and can be used by anyone (usually only covers HTTP); and private, which delivers a more reliable and secure service but you have to pay for. For public proxies, we recommend Hide My Ass (www.hidemyass.com/proxy). This is limited by having servers in only three countries, compared to the 63 countries Hide My Ass’s VPN tools span, but very easy to use: just enter the name of the download site, turn SSL
security on and click the Hide My Ass button. We also like Anonymouse (anonymouse.org), which is even more basic but fast, and Proxy 4 Free (www.proxy4free.com), where you’ll find a list of fast, free proxy servers.
If you’d prefer to use a private proxy to anonymise files you download using non-browser software, try Proxy Solutions (www.proxysolutions.net), which costs from $12 (£7.85) per month, with a three-day free trial; or TorGuard (bit.ly/torguard365), which is designed to work with torrents and costs $5.95 (£3.89) per month.
Protect your identity using a VPN
Although VPNs also make it look as if you’re browsing from a different location, they differ from proxies by encrypting all your traffic. Once you connect to the VPN server, all your internet activity is disguised, including downloads from websites and torrents. It’s like creating a secure web tunnel from your PC to your download destination.
There are lots of great VPNs to choose from, many of which offer a free service so you can find out whether the service is suitable for your needs before upgrading to the paid-for option for faster downloads and more features. CyberGhost (www.cyberghostvpn.com) is our personal favourite and gives you unlimited bandwidth and traffic. Upgrade to the Premium service for just £3.99 a month and you get more servers and countries, a five-fold increase in speed and no waiting times.
Other good options are TunnelBear (www.tunnelbear.com), which lets you download 500MB of data a month for free or pay $4.99 (£3.26) for unlimited ‘tunnelling’; and Hola (hola.org), a peer-to-peer VPN service compatible with most browsers and mobile platforms that is free for private use.
Download torrents anonymously
BitTorrent continues to be very popular for downloading music, films and TV shows, but the way it works makes it easy for snoopers to see who you are and what you’re downloading. One of the easiest ways to protect your identity when downloading torrents is to use Tribler (www.tribler.org), a BitTorrent program designed to offer anonymous downloading. It’s a work in progress, so it’s not yet as anonymous as it hopes to be, which means you may not want to trust it completely, but it’s a lot more private than most torrent tools.
Another option is an anonymous proxy such as TorrentPrivacy (www.torrentprivacy.com) to disguise who you are. It will set you back $6 (£3.90) per month or $58 (£37.90) for the year. Alternatively, BTGuard (btguard.com) offers an anonymising BitTorrent proxy for £4.68 per month, or a VPN for £6.71 per month.
VPNs are a good solution for downloading torrents anonymously, but you’ll probably need to sign up to a paid-for service, because most (but not all) free VPNs tend to be too slow for the large files involved in torrenting.
Use a seedbox to download torrents
A seedbox is a high-speed server that’s specifically designed for torrent downloads. Unlike regular BitTorrent downloading, your IP address isn’t shared, and seedboxes usually deliver much faster download speeds (most are on 100Mbps lines), although you’ll need to download files from the seedbox to your home PC afterwards. You can manage your torrents through a uTorrent web interface so you don’t need to have a BitTorrent program running on your PC and giving the game away.
All these benefits make seedboxes a great solution if you want to torrent content completely anonymously. Prices vary, but ExtremeSeed (extremeseed.com) offers shared seeders for from $20 (£13) a month, and dedicated servers for from $65 (£42.50) a month. You should find a shared seedbox sufficient to begin with, unless you’re an extremely heavy downloader.
Use browser tools to disguise downloads
There are plenty of browser add-ons that can hide and disguise your online activity. One of the best is anonymoX (www.anonymox.net), a proxy tool for Firefox and Chrome that routes your browsing through its own servers, concealing your IP address. It’s free to use if you’re willing to put up with ads, but if not, you can upgrade to the Premium version for ¤4.50 (£3.33) per month, which gives you unlimited traffic and faster downloads, too.
We’re also big fans of ZenMate (zenmate.com), which is available for Firefox, Chrome and Opera. It encrypts and protects your browser traffic, and hides your identity. ZenMate is free, but if you want unlimited monthly traffic and additional features, you could try one of the paid-for plans. These cost from $4.99 (£3.26) a month if you buy a yearly subscription.
FoxyProxy (getfoxyproxy.org) isn’t just a clever name, it’s also a popular Firefox add-on that’s now available for Chrome and Internet Explorer. Although there are free Basic and Standard versions, it’s best to sign up to the ‘Plus VPN and proxy’ service which costs $7.49 (£4.90) a month.
Download files privately from Usenet
Long before BitTorrent first offered a simple way to download content from other users, there was Usenet. First created in 1979, it remains a popular, fast and private way of sharing files over the internet. To use it, you’ll first need to sign up to a Usenet service so you can access the newsgroups where files are shared. Subscription prices vary depending on which service you go for. EasyNews (easynews.com) is one of the better options and will set you back from $9.98 (£6.50) a month. However, this only gets you 20GB of bandwidth. Other plans available each offer a 14-day free trial, so you can try before you buy (you’ll need to register a payment method beforehand, but you can cancel this before you’re charged).
ON YOUR PHONE OR TABLET
Use a VPN for iOS or Android
Many VPNs that are available for your PC also come in app form, so you can browse the web and download files anonymously on your mobile devices. TunnelBear (www.tunnelbear.com) is available for Android and iOS and is very easy to use on both platforms. It’s free, although you only get 500MB of data month, so if you need more, you’ll have to upgrade via an in-app purchase.
CyberGhost (www.cyberghostvpn.com) is also available for both Android and iOS, but you’ll need to be a paid Premium user to use it on your iPhone or iPad. You can also try Hola (hola.org) and Hideman (www.hideman.net) which both offer free and highly rated VPNs for mobile devices.
Hide and encrypt mobile downloads
You can keep downloaded files private on your phone or tablet using the excellent free app Keeper (keepersecurity.com). It’s available for iPhone and iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone – just go to the Keeper website on your device and click Get Keeper Now, to be routed to the relevant app store.
The Vault on iOS (bit.ly/vault365) is also good for securing content on your iPhone or iPad. It’s free, but there are in-app purchases for additional features, such as Hidden Folders and SecureShare.
Android users should consider AppLock (bit.ly/applock365), which as well as locking apps can hide any pictures and videos you download; or Folder Lock (bit.ly/folder365), which lets you password-protect specific files and folders.
Hide apps you’ve downloaded
If you’ve downloaded some apps to your iPhone or iPad that you’d rather keep to yourself, you can conceal their presence using the iOS 8 Family Sharing feature. Set it up by going to Settings, iCloud, ‘Set up Family Sharing’ on your device. To hide apps in the future, open the App Store app, tap Updates then tap the Purchased button. Tap ‘My Purchases’, then swipe left and tap Hide.
For Android, you can either lock apps using the aforementioned AppLock or hide them using the excellent Disable Bloatware – Hide Apps (bit.ly/disable365) until you’re ready to use them again.
ON YOUR PC
Clear all record of your downloads
Whenever you download a file, your browser stores the details in its Downloads list, which anyone who uses your computer can easily access. If you want to keep your downloads private, you can clear this list so that no-one knows what files you’ve been downloading. In Firefox, go to Tools, Downloads, right-click a download and select Clear List. In Chrome, open the Downloads page (chrome://downloads) and click Clear All (you can also open the list by pressing Ctrl+J).
If you think clearing your entire Downloads list might look suspicious, you can just delete selected items instead. In Firefox, right-click a download and select ‘Remove from History’. In Chrome, click the ‘Remove from List’ link beneath the download.
Hide downloads from your browser
Although you can clear downloads from the list, you need to remember to do so. For that reason it might be better to tell your browser not to remember them in the first place. You can do this by using private browsing mode. In Firefox, open the menu and select New Private Window. In Chrome, open the menu and select New Incognito Window. When you download something it will appear under Downloads as normal. However, when you close the private browsing window your browser will conveniently forget it ever downloaded anything during the session.
Hide your Downloads folder
Wise Folder Hider (bit.ly/wisefolder365) can hide everything you download from prying eyes. Create a master password, then either drag a folder to the program window, choose the Hide Folder option on the toolbar or right-click a folder and choose ‘Hide folder with Wise Folder Hider’. The main catch to hiding your Downloads folder is that your browser will only be able to download content to it when the folder isn’t hidden. In other words, you’ll need to unhide the folder before downloading and then remember to hide it again afterwards (just closing Wise Folder Hider does that for you). If you download a file when the folder is still hidden, Windows will create a new (visible) Downloads folder and save the item there, so you’ll need to hide that one too!
You should also remember that, although the folder will be invisible, all your downloads will still appear in your browser’s downloads list until you clear it, unless you use private browsing mode (see previous tips).
Lock specific download folders
The new program Anvi Folder Locker (www.anvisoft.com) works in the same way as Wise Folder Hider and can be used to hide your Downloads folder and any other folders you download files to. However it also offers some additional options that may prove useful. You can lock a folder, make it read-only (so no-one can change the contents), hide and lock it, and password-protect it. Like Wise Folder Hider, Anvi Folder Locker uses a master password, so no-one can access your folders or make changes to the settings, which makes it ideal for preventing people from seeing what you’ve downloaded.
Sandbox your downloads
When you sandbox programs, using a tool such as Sandboxie (www.sandboxie.com), it prevents them from interfering with Windows, so if you download a dodgy program infected with malware, it won’t be able to harm your PC. Another benefit to this is that if you run your browser in a sandbox, all the files you download – programs, movies, games and so on – are sandboxed too. You can open and use them as normal, but when you empty the sandbox, all trace of their existence will be wiped.
You can also use VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org) to set up a virtualised operating system on your PC, and download files there.
Delete old downloads automatically
Cyber-D Autodelete (bit.ly/autodelete365) is a useful free tool that can be set to automatically clear the contents of your Downloads folder after a set number of days. This saves you needing to remember to do so manually, in case a nosy parker wants to know what you’ve been downloading. To use the program, click the Add Folder button and browse to your Downloads folder. Click the Date Filters tab and set how long you want to keep downloads for before deleting them. The Delete Options tab let you choose how to remove the downloads – you can send them to your Recycle Bin, or securely overwrite them to delete them for good.
Rename your torrents
Files that you download via BitTorrent often have names that betray their illegal origins, such as the name of the group that sourced and shared them. You can rename these downloads to make them look less suspicious. You can do this manually of course (select a file, press F2 and enter a new name), but if you have a lot of files to retitle, Filebot (www.filebot.net) is a much better option. This free program can automatically rename films and TV shows using information pulled from various online databases, including IMDb and TV.com, so they look more like official downloads.
ON SOMEONE ELSE’S PC
Download files to a USB stick
If you’re downloading on a PC other than your own, such as at a friend’s house or in a hotel, you can keep what you grab from the web private by downloading files to a USB memory stick instead, rather than the hard drive. Use the browser’s private-browsing mode to make sure there’s no trace of what you’ve downloaded.
Use Tails
Tails (tails.boum.org), which stands for The Amnesiac Incognito Live System, is a live Linux-based operating system that you can boot into and use on any computer. It’s optimised for anonymity, doesn’t leave any traces behind and comes with a collection of privacy and encryption tools (infamous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is a big fan). If you’re planning to do a lot of downloading away from home, it’s definitely worth taking Tails with you.
You can run Tails from a DVD, but obviously any files you download can’t be saved to that, so you should run the operating system from a USB stick or SD card instead.
Download files directly to Dropbox
BoxMyDownloads (www.boxmydownloads.com) lets you download files directly from the web to your Dropbox account. Sign into the site with your Dropbox login details to create a My Downloads folder in your Dropbox, then paste the URL of the file you want to load into the box provided and click Download. The free BoxMyDownloads option limits you to five downloads a day, but if you upgrade for $4.99 (£3.27) per month, there are no limits to the number of files you can download.