I’ve worked the tor network into my internet usage, and through experimentation I have settled on the decision logic in the chart above. Not surprisingly, this usage logic runs mostly counter to the interests of the internet advertizing and market data industries that want to have the private interest data in order to predict and then attempt to influence financial behavior.
When I refer to stateful firewall, I specifically mean a firewall that blocks all “unrelated” connections from the external internet. There are other types of stateful firewalls, but that type is the most common and useful for general security. With such a firewall, every connection has to be invited by the user. This type of firewall prevents the sites that you connect to from transmitting your connection data to third party servers to source content from them. This is not always a malicious usage, but my desired policy is that if a site wants to provide a user with content from a third party, then that site’s servers can connect to that third party themselves and vouch for the information that they refer the user to, rather than forcing the user’s system to accept the risk while passing the user’s connection data to unknown third parties. If connections to such sites are necessary, then tor can be used to prevent the third parties from learning the user’s actual connection data.
Oh, and Tor is not recommended for that private thing that one may be thinking of, Tor inherently has less bandwidth than the regular internet, so streaming videos is frowned upon.
