The Tor network (often seen in its shortened form “Tor”) is an open-source privacy network that offers its users the ability to surf the internet anonymously. It also enables users to visit sites that would have been otherwise inaccessible to them.
When you use Tor, your web traffic will be encrypted, making it hard for anyone else to read it, even if they could intercept it. Please note the Tor browser doesn’t let you use the whole internet. It’s only for web browsing. Things like FTP, BitTorrent, or any other activity outside of a browser are not within the Tor protocol’s scope.
As good as this level of anonymity and privacy Tor provides you, it still needs to be 100% full-proof. For starters, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and government security agencies can identify traffic protected by Tor. Unfortunately, this is not convenient because even though you use Tor for its many legitimate services, the network gets infamously tied to illegal activity. And as such, you stand the risk of attracting unwanted attention.
For this reason, you should use Tor alongside a Virtual Private Network (VPN). A VPN serves as a means to hide the use of Tor. It does this by adding an extra layer of encryption and routing your traffic through a secondary server. Note that your VPN provider can tell you’re using Tor, but only them.
With this solution to the anonymity and privacy problem, we will discuss the best VPNs to maximize privacy when using the Tor network.
