If you use no anonymity solution you still have a chance of remaining anonymous in the sense that your IP address may not be linked to your identity. Law enforcement have limited resources, and in fact are only capable of following up on a fairly small percentage of the IP addresses they have identified engaging in illegal activity. Since ISP's only keep records of who is assigned a certain IP address at a certain time for a certain amount of time, if law enforcement does not get around to following up the lead involving your IP address before the record of who the IP address was assigned to is lost, you can maintain anonymity. However, your ISP is capable of seeing every website you go to (if they look), and every website you go to is capable of seeing your IP address (but possibly not using it to determine your identity). You should certainly not expect to remain anonymous from interested parties with any significant capabilities whilst not using any anonymity solution, but it does happen all the time (generally due to overloaded LE resources, which they generally but not exclusively focus towards higher priority targets). If you use a single hop anonymity solution the situation greatly improves. The websites you visit now can not immediately determine your IP address but rather see the IP address of the proxy you are using. Likewise, your ISP can no longer trivially determine the websites you are surfing, they (ideally) only see that you are connecting to the proxy. However, the proxy provider can see which websites you are surfing to, and so can its ISP. Also, the proxy may keep logs which can be followed up on. Also anyone monitoring the proxy is capable of getting the same information that the proxy gets. If you use a double hop anonymity solution the situation improves even more than before. Still your ISP can not see the websites you surf, only that you connect to your entry proxy. Also, the websites you surf still can not determine your IP address, only that someone is using your exit proxy to visit them. Now you also have the additional benefit that the entry proxy does not know which websites you are surfing, only that you connect to your exit proxy. Additionally, the exit proxy does not know who you are, only the websites that you surf. Ideally the ISPs of the entry and exit proxy will be different and will not be able to link your IP address to the websites you surf either. Also, now an attacker starting from the website you surf and trying to trace their way back to you will need to get logs from two proxy servers instead of one, and either of the proxy servers might not be keeping logs or not keeping logs long enough to be of use. If you use a three hop anonymity solution, the situation improves a bit more. Mostly it is the same as using a two hop solution, however now the entry and exit proxy do not know the identities of each other, only the identity of the middle proxy. Now if the entry proxy is run by the US feds and the exit proxy is run by the German feds, even if they have logs that could be used together to deanonymize you, unless they routinely share intelligence they will not know to get in touch with each other regarding specific packets unless they can learn each others identities via the middle proxy. Additionally, an attacker starting at the website you surf and trying to trace their way back to you with log files, needs to get logs from three different proxy servers that may not be logging and may not keep logs for long. Now the biggest attack that you need to worry about is an end point timing correlation. And attacker who can see packets coming from you and packets arriving at the website you surf can use statistical timing analysis to determine that the packets they see in both locations are 'the same', thus linking you to the website you visit. Past three the benefits of adding more hops very rapidly decrease. The end point timing attack continues to work regardless of the number of middle nodes. Adding additional nodes only really adds additional protection from an attacker who starts at the website you visit and tries to use log files from each proxy on the path back to you. So the difference between using no proxy and a single hop proxy is huge, the difference between using a single hop proxy and two proxies is tremendous, the difference between using a two hop proxy and a three hop proxy is significant, and after that the benefit of adding more hops is minimal.