Gabrielle DiFonzo writes: > Okay. Now I'm officially confused. > > If I download Tor, can't I run it as a separate program from IE? Can I run > the two programs separately, like the proverbial ships in the night? > > Can someone tell me exactly what it means to configure Tor through IE? Can't > I configure it by itself and continue to use the two independently of each > other?
You can have both on your computer, but unless you specifically tell IE to send information through Tor, you won't be getting any privacy benefits from Tor when you're using IE. It doesn't prevent you from using IE, but it doesn't improve or protect IE either. Although IE could be asked to send information through Tor, which would then provide privacy benefits, people keep talking about the Tor Browser because ① it's easier (you can just download the Tor Browser and run it, and all that browsing activity with Tor Browser is automatically protected by Tor) ② there are some technical problems in other browsers that mean that the privacy benefits of using them with Tor are not as great as we would like. The Tor Browser developers have tried to think about all of these issues and create a browser that's optimized to work together with Tor to get the most privacy protection possible. The discussion of what's meant by "privacy benefits of using them with Tor" and "most privacy protection possible" is pretty involved, and mostly has to do with web sites actively trying to figure out who you are and where you're connecting from, the things that Tor is trying to conceal. -- Seth Schoen <sch...@eff.org> Senior Staff Technologist https://www.eff.org/ Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/join 815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA 94109 +1 415 436 9333 x107 _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
