Off-the-radar on-the-go: Android gets anonymous browsing

From satiating paranoia to working around company/school firewalls and geolocational limitations, there are countless reasons why someone might want to browse the web anonymously. While such things are pretty simple to do on a full-blown computer, going faceless on a mobile handset hasn’t proven too feasible – until now.

By combining the expandability of Android with the open source anonymity network Tor, those clever gents over at the University of Cambridge have made it all work.

It comes in two parts:

• TorProxy: This is the Tor client, which handles all of the communication with the Tor Network. It’s a separate service, with the benefit being that any tailored application to push their data through it for the sake of anonymity.
• Shadow: The built in Android browser can’t be configured to work with TorProxy, so this takes its place.

You install both, wait for the proxy to make the proper connections, and then fire up the browser. We’d never recommend using this for illegal uses, of course – but if you’ve got a legit reason to stay off the radar, this is about as plug and play as it gets.

[Via Reddit]