How to use Tails OS, the best free private operating system
Don’t want to leave a trace? Consider Tails, a portable operating system you can run on a USB stick.
Hello Startpage fans! We know you love our private search engine because you understand the importance of privacy. You know that the most famous names in Big Tech make money from collecting data on you in exchange for their free-of-charge services. You understand that no entity should have more information on you than is absolutely necessary in order for them to do their jobs.
As long as you’re using our search engine and our Anonymous View web proxy, we can make sure to maintain your privacy on the web. We never record IP addresses, we never use tracking cookies, and with Anonymous view, we’ll let external websites fingerprint our web servers and not your PC or phone.
A lot of you also do other things to protect your privacy online. You may use a VPN. You may choose web browsers that respect your privacy, such as Vivaldi. And, you may also choose private email services like StartMail. But what if you want maximum privacy?
Whether you use macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, or Android, we can’t control what your operating system does. In situations where you need as much privacy as technologically possible, you may want to choose an operating system that forgets about your activity the way we forget about your web searches. Enter Tails OS.
What is Tails OS?
Tails is an operating system that’s based on Debian Linux. You don’t install it on your hard drive. It runs completely off of a USB thumb drive. Your work is temporarily stored in the RAM (memory) of your computer. As soon as you shut your computer down, your RAM is empty, nothing is stored, and everything is forgotten. No traces are left on your computer. If you’re using Tails to make a document, you’d better upload it to the internet because that’s the only way it can be stored.
From Tails’ website:
“To use Tails, shut down the computer and start on your Tails USB stick instead of starting on Windows, macOS, or Linux.
You can temporarily turn your own computer into a secure machine. You can also stay safe while using the computer of somebody else.”
Tails applications
It’s difficult (but not impossible) to install applications in Tails, due to the nature of how it works. So developers made sure to pre-install a wide variety of applications to help you do whatever it is you need to do. Here’s a list of some of the applications that come with Tails:
- LibreOffice for Word, Excel, and other Microsoft Office-format documents
- GIMP and Inkscape for making graphics
- Audacity for audio recording
- Brasero for DVD burning
- LUKS and VeraCrypt encrypted volume support
- KeePassXC password manager
- Pidgin for instant messaging
- Tor Browser for the web
- Thunderbird for email
- Electrum for Bitcoin
- Tor internet routing
Everything you do online in Tails is automatically encrypted through the Tor proxy network. So the data you send through the internet is kept private. Make sure you use Startpage to search the clearnet (regular web) in Tor, and you’ve got a complete privacy solution!
Who uses Tails?
Tails may not be practical for frequent computer work because it won’t write data to your hard drive. But if you plug in an external data storage device with LUKS or VeraCrypt encrypted volumes, that could be a possible solution.
Tails sacrifices some convenience in order to maintain privacy. But there are groups of people who may want to use Tails frequently.
Some people travel a lot or don’t have a regular home. Tails can be used on library PCs and internet cafe PCs as long as the USB ports are enabled. And then no data is stored on a PC that you don’t own.
Political activists may use Tails to avoid government surveillance. And when journalists deal with sensitive work or work in hostile countries, Tails empowers them to do important investigative journalism without big corporations or authoritarian governments getting in the way.
Privacy experts on Tails
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden:
“If you look at the way post-2013 whistleblowers have been caught, it is clear the absolute most important thing you can do to maintain your anonymity is reduce the number of places in your operational activity where you can make mistakes. Tor and Tails still do precisely that.”
Electronic Frontier Foundation:
“One of the most robust ways of using the Tor network is through a dedicated operating system that enforces strong privacy- and security-protective defaults. That operating system is Tails.”
Tails is free software, and you can download it and learn how to install it from their installation page.
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