What is Tails?¶
Tails — short for The Amnesic Incognito Live System — is a portable operating system built for privacy and anonymity. It runs entirely from a USB drive without touching the computer's hard disk, and leaves no trace after shutdown.
All network traffic in Tails is routed through Tor by default, hiding the user's IP address and encrypting connections. A full suite of open-source privacy tools comes pre-installed and pre-configured: Tor Browser, Thunderbird (encrypted email), KeePassXC (passwords), OnionShare (file sharing over Tor), and a metadata cleaner, among others.
Because Tails runs only in RAM and resets completely on shutdown, there are no persistent logs of visited websites, opened files, stored passwords, or connected Wi-Fi networks — unless the user explicitly enables encrypted persistent storage.
Tails is used by journalists, activists, civil society groups, and anyone who needs a clean, traceless working environment without installing a new operating system on their machine.