Man searching the dark web busts major myth people have about using the website

For those of us who don't dance on the shadowy side of the internet, the dark web seems like quite a scary place.

It's the world wide web's murky underworld where censorship and rules don't really exist, brimming with content which people can't access on regular search engines like Google.

Instead, you have to find a way in via a specialised browser which allows you to peruse through the long list of sites which use encryption software so that visitors can remain anonymous - hence why it's home to so much illegal activity.

The dark web is something that you use at your own risk, as one wrong move could see you click on a seriously dodgy link or potentially download malware onto your device without you knowing.

But there's another danger that people are regularly warned about, which this bloke reckons is a complete myth.

Online personality Thunder Keck, who regularly shares his weird dark web findings as well as tips and tricks on how to use it on social media, shared a video asking people to 'please stop warning' him about opening his browser in full screen.

He explained that every time he uploads a clip of himself on TikTok showing how he accesses the dark web via the Tor Browser, dozens of people leave comments warning that this essentially removes his anonymity.

While enlarging the web page, Thunder joked: "Oh no! Full screen, they're coming!

"I get this comment all the time," he said. "Every time I post a dark web video, people are like, 'He's opening Tor in full screen! They're going to find him!'

"First of all, who's they? Second, it does not matter. It kinda mattered in like 2010, but even then, it didn't really matter."

He explained that although a lot of people 'tell you not to go in full screen' when visiting the dark web, it doesn't actually make a difference anymore.

Thunder said: "The reason for that is that it tells the website your screen resolution - which means that even though people can't track who you are, they could associate your traffic across multiple sites with the same screen resolution.

"Even though this wasn't a huge deal, the Tor Project actually fixed this."

For those who don't know, screen resolution is the number of pixels which are displayed on a screen in each dimension - horizontally and vertically - at one time.

But according to a Reddit user, this data is not exactly 'practically useful' as they compared it to 'trying to find someone in a forest and knowing what colour shoe laces they have'.

Essentially, it's very tricky to track someone down just from their screen resolution - but, it's not impossible.

Thunder then explained how the Tor Browser had been adapted to overcome this issue.

He continued: "This is an onion site right here and I'm on Tor Browser.

"You'll notice that there's this chunk of grey at the bottom of my screen and as I resize the window, you'll see that the site jumps from resolution to resolution.

"That's to keep everyone in the same subset of resolutions. And when you go full screen, there's still a little bit of grey around there. That way, everyone's the same and there's no way they can track you down if you're the one person on earth who uses like 1081p or something."

The video showed how the small grey section remained no matter what size Thunder's screen was.

He added: "Also, if you have a monitor like me, you can just set the resolution to be exactly what it would be if the window was smaller.

"Other people say you don't want to be in full screen so that you can still see if you're downloading something - which is fair, but there's a lot of other ways to make sure you're not downloading files while you're on the dark web.

"So thank you for your concern, but please stop warning me about this," the content creator said.

Social media users weren't all entirely convinced, but others did thank Thunder for sharing the nugget of knowledge.

One person commented: "It's funny how people see the dark web as a scary secret cult."

Another said: "Bro casually diving in like it's YouTube."

A third added: "My brother in christ. why are you using windows for Tor?"

A fourth added: "It's true that only using the size alone is rather hard to track you, but even with those gray boxes, you still have a **more** unique size as the vast majority uses the default size. Also note that using other details, it makes it much easier to track you when you have such a such a size. Oh and 'they' are the advertisement companies. Lol if you really did not know that."

While a fifth said: "Way to be sure you aren’t downloading anything on there, DON’T GO ON THERE."