This way, authorities monitoring internet traffic cannot track the location of Tor users. “Onion routing” allows anonymous browsing and communication by bouncing a searcher’s internet traffic through three “layers”, or random servers in the Tor network. But, there are certain anonymized, private encrypted browsers that allow access to the darknet,” Peña said.Īccording to Peña, The Onion Router, or Tor, is the most common way to access the darknet. That’s how they send us content that they advertise or sponsor. “All of our other browsers– Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer– track us by location. Joslenne Peña is a visiting assistant professor at Macalester who specializes in human-computer interaction. The dark web is a small, hidden part of the deep web that requires special software to access. This includes anything with a log-in or a paywall, including personal email or social media accounts, databases or dropbox. The deep web makes up the other 99.7% of the internet and contains encrypted sites that don’t immediately show up through searches.

The surface web makes up about 0.03% of the internet, and includes anything immediately accessible by the public through search engines like Google or Bing.

The internet can be divided into three main parts – the surface web, the deep web and the dark web.

Deep web explorer