I'm not so sure about using tor, to me that is nothing more than a honey pot, however another thing you can do is to encrypt your hard drive and to avoid using your smartphones to anything that is too personal and avoid social media as well.
Tor is as much of a honey pot as is Bitcoin. Only reason why Tor was given to public (it was developed by US Navy) is because you can only be anonymous in a crowd, so government agencies needed general population to use it and some government agencies are still funding it.
You are probably afraid of it because of a lot of stories about dark markets and all that, which is exactly why some are afraid of Bitcoin. scared they will be connected with terrorists and criminals and whatnot.
Neither Tor nor Bitcoin are very anonymous, there are better ways to be anonymous on the Internet with botnets and there are better ways to fund terrorists with cash. It is just that they are developed to be the best they can for the general population. There are reasons for existence of both of these technologies, not everything is simple like that. For certain use, they are both very good.
Great explanation of what's going on.
And about what peolple think about BTC and TOR, you're totally right: they do not have good information of it and tent to believe what mass media say ( and they don't even know theirselves so how could they give ).
Always try to give youself ax explanation of everythink and do not believe at first what is being said
