Although the actual privacy benefit of this is less than most people assume, I provide it as an option that is beneficial in a few small cases. When proxying through Tor, this hides the user’s IP address from the websites they are visiting.

Not only does this follow the good design guidelines of having the OS handle DNS instead of the browser, but it also is a limitation in Android’s WebView, meaning that there is no easy way to override this behavior even if I wanted to. In Privacy Browser, when selecting a proxy through the options menu, that proxy handles HTTP and HTTPS traffic. This is part of some companies’ belief that the browser should become the operating system, which is the exactly opposite of Privacy Browser’s core privacy and security design. There is a movement afoot in recent years to have browsers ignore the OS DNS settings and implement DNS on their own. The email was concerned that DNS requests were not being proxied through Tor even when Privacy Browser was set to use Tor to proxy HTTP requests. I recently received an email from a user asking a question about DNS and Tor which prompted me to think that a blog post on this topic would be helpful to users.

Tor proxy android