Getting stuck with a Scandinavian version of Google is seen as a small price to pay by those trying to hide their digital traces and circumvent censorship on the net.

“I’ve a button in Firefox [the web browser] I click and my [data] packets go off encrypted to a network of volunteers and private computers around the world,” says Danny O’Brien, international outreach co-ordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights pressure group.