Configuring Privoxy to use TOR

In these days of censorship concerns, increasing numbers of people are using TOR as a proxy and thus, increasing numbers of people are configuring their browsers wrong and going to the TOR check page only to realize that for all their proxy configurations, they either cannot see the page at all, or they see the result that they are not using TOR.

You set your HTTP Proxy to 8118, Socks5 Proxy to 9050 and imagined that it would work, but it doesn’t. Here’s what could be going wrong.

The proxy server is refusing connections

or

Firefox is configured to use a proxy server that is refusing connections.

This means that while you installed TOR, you did not install Privoxy. The port 8118 points to the Privoxy proxy. If you haven’t installed it, there is nothing to receive the connections. On Ubuntu, go

sudo apt-get install privoxy

On Windows… go to http://privoxy.org to download a suitable release. Install.

Which brings you to the next problem.

Sorry. You are not using TOR

You have checked everything. TOR is running. The onion is green. You have installed privoxy. It is running. Your proxy setting is 8118. You are able to access sites. BUT YOU ARE NOT USING TOR.

This is because privoxy is a proxy that:

Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk.

It does NOT use TOR unless you tell it to. You can do this by manually editing the configuration file, which on Ubuntu is located at /etc/privoxy/config (will update with the windows location soon, but should be easily found in the program files for privoxy.

Open it as root. Do a ‘find text’ for “localhost:9050”. The line will say:

# forward-socks5 / localhost:9050 .

Uncomment it by deleting the “#” in the beginning. Save and close file.

Now point your browser to http://check.torproject.org

You should see a bold green heading:

Congratulations. Your browser is configured to use TOR.

Done.

Note: If you do not see this text, please troubleshoot further. Without this text, your browsing is NOT anonymous.