Tools whose primary purpose is protecting the privacy or anonymity of your network activity – Category:VPN services, self-hosted tunnels, and the Tor anonymity network.

This is distinct from tools that are private but do some other job: end-to-end encrypted messengers like Signal live under Category:Secure Messaging (their function is communication; privacy is an attribute), and secret storage lives under Category:Password Management. Use those categories for those needs; this one is for hiding where your traffic goes and who is sending it.

The most important idea in this whole category: there is no tool that makes you anonymous against everyone. Every option here defends against some adversaries and not others, so the question is never “is this secure?” but “secure against whom?”. Most real-world deanonymizations don’t come from broken cryptography – they come from a compromised device or browser, a leaked login or reused handle, or an adversary who can observe enough of the network to correlate traffic. Pick the tool that covers your adversary, and remember that operational discipline (what you log into, what you leak) usually matters more than the tool.

For the specific trade-offs between a self-hosted tunnel, a shared-IP provider, and Tor, see the comparison table in Category:VPN.