Whether it’s to elude oppressive governments or something a bit less noble, many users have a need to browse the Web in complete secrecy. Tools that enable anonymous browsing have existed for years on the desktop and some have popped up for Android. There are some for iOS as well, but until now, none of them featured the bulletproof privacy of the Tor network.
Enter Covert Browser, which was approved by Apple earlier this week. It uses Tor to encrypt Internet traffic and route it through three different servers to ensure data about users cannot be intercepted by third parties. Such data would include browsing history or, more commonly, one’s geographic location.
As you might imagine, browsing the Web this way is not quite as speedy as doing so in a normal browser. In some cases, often for their own safety, users require absolute anonymity, and for them the lag time in browsing in undoubtedly worth it.
Common use cases for Tor include activists wishing to elude authorities, journalists hiding their sources and even law enforcement encrypting their own online communication. Wikileaks has also used Tor to transfer documents.
In this case, Tor’s infrastructure is being used to reroute and strongly encrypt Internet traffic, something that previously wasn’t possible on non-jailbroken iOS devices, at least not to this extent.
The initial release of Covert Browser has some stability issues, with a few users noting that the app crashes frequently. As one commented in the user reviews, “I can’t order my drugs, tiger meat and rhinoceros horns with a browser that crashes all the time!” Hoffman has already submitted an update to the App Store that attempts to fix these problems.
