Many people have legitimate reasons to hide their identity on the Internet.
The Internet is a way of lulling you into a false sense of anonymity. After all, how can someone find out your real identity in the virtual world? In fact, by simply connecting to the Internet, you share information about your computer, your geographic location, and even the websites you visit.
The purpose of anonymous web browsing is to bypass technologies that track your online activity and could potentially disclose your personal information to others. Thanks to anonymous surfing, no one knows who you are, where you are connecting from, or which sites you visit.
When people think of surfing the Internet anonymously, they automatically associate it with extramarital affairs, malicious hacking, illegal downloading, and other nasty behavior. This is not necessarily the case. In fact, there are many legitimate reasons why someone would like to remain anonymous on the Internet:
- Your employer or school has strict guidelines for web browsing, and they filter your Internet access.
- You are a staunch defender of free speech and do not want the government or anyone else to censor your activities.
- You believe the Internet is the ideal forum where you can freely express your opinion without fear of harassment or harassment from people who disagree with that opinion.
- You believe that the Bill of Rights and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights give you the right to run your private business without outside interference.
- You live abroad and want to access streaming video content that is only available to people living in your country.
- You don't like the idea that search engines collect information about your searches.
- You don't want online advertisers to know where you live and what products you buy.
- You want to anonymously participate in online forums, for example, to talk to other people about a particular medical condition or to discuss
CONTENT
- IP addresses and cookies
- Putting together your online identity
- Anonymous proxy servers
- Privacy settings in your browser
- Anonymous registration
IP addresses and cookies
Cookies can track your browsing history to personalize your online purchases.
Every machine connected to the Internet has a unique IP address, including your computer. You can have a static IP address, or it can change every time you access the Internet. In any case, every time you surf the Internet, you are assigned a unique identifier.
An IP address is required for the Internet to function . It is literally the address of your personal computer on a vast computer network - like a separate house on a crowded street. The only way a web server can send the content of a web page to your browser is if it has your computer's address on the network.
IP addresses by themselves do not contain any personally identifiable information about you. However, if you are registered with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) - this is how most of us get our Internet services - then your ISP can easily associate your IP address with your name, home address, phone number, etc. ... email address and even credit card details.
Don't get paranoid: In general, ISPs have fairly strict privacy policies. They will not give out your personal information to the random person who asks for it. However, under laws such as the US Patriot Act and subpoenas from police and federal agencies, the provider may have no choice but to provide personal information associated with an IP address.
Cookies are another way for an external source to track your browsing habits. Cookies are tiny text files that are stored in your web browser when you visit a website. The file may contain your registration information, your user preferences, the contents of your online shopping cart, and other identifiers. These cookies make your web browsing more personal and customizable. They are designed to save you time when visiting your favorite sites. They are also designed to help advertisers tailor their messages to your personal preferences.
Essential cookies are cookies that are left on your browser from the websites you visit. Third party cookiesare files stored on your computer from advertisers and other parties that have agreements on the exchange of information with the site you visited. Many people find that third-party cookies are a particularly egregious violation of privacy because you have no control over who collects information about you.
In the next section, we'll take a closer look at how scammers can use online data to piece together your identity.
Putting together your online identity
By themselves, cookies and IP addresses cannot reveal your personal information, but when these clues are combined with other web surfing data, such as your search history, you can unwittingly reveal your identity to hackers, scammers, or government investigators.
Search engines usually store search terms associated with your IP address. Google stores search queries for nine months, while MSN stores them for 18 months. By examining hundreds or thousands of searches from the same IP address, it is possible to identify a person, especially if they have performed a map search at their home address or entered their social security number.
Another threat to online privacy is associated with Internet email accounts. If you use the same website for both email and Internet searches, you may leave a very clear trail for hackers and cybercriminals when you go online.
For example, if you use Google as your email provider, you need to sign in to Gmail.com for every email session. Any Google search on the Internet that you do when you log into your email account will be associated with the same IP address as your email account. From there, it will be easy for a hacker or other third party to link your searches to your email address and use that information to send you custom spam or other email scams.
The easiest and most direct way to track your web surfing is to view the history in your web browser. Your web browser keeps a chronological list of all the websites you visit. Most web browsers keep your browsing history for at least a week by default. If anyone wants to spy on your web surfing, all they have to do is open your browser and search your history.
If you are browsing the Internet from a work computer, your boss does not need to physically turn on your computer and check your browser history. Since you work in an office network, your employer has the right to keep track of which sites you visit.
In the next section, we'll talk about anonymous proxy servers, one of the most effective ways to hide your identity on the Internet.
You Are What You Are Looking
For In 2006, AOL published 20 million user search stories for research purposes. Each search history was tagged with a number, not a name. However, journalists were able to successfully identify some of these "numbers" simply by examining their searches. More than 100 people searched for their social security numbers.
Anonymous proxy servers
Every time you enter a URL into your web browser and press Enter, your computer sends a request to the web server, which then returns the web page to you. To do this, the web server needs to know your IP address. So much for anonymous surfing, right?
Optional: One way to avoid revealing your IP address to every web server you contact is to use a proxy server. A proxy server is a machine that sits between you and the rest of the Internet. Each page request goes through a proxy server first.
Anonymous proxy serveris a special kind of proxy loaded with software that erases your IP address from any page requests and replaces it with your own. When a page is sent back by a web server, the proxy server then forwards it to you without any additional programming scripts that could compromise your identity.
The most popular type of anonymous proxy is web proxy. All you have to do is go to the website of the proxy service, enter your desired URL into the dedicated address field, and the service anonymously relays the request to the web server.
Anonymous proxies have some disadvantages. Since every inbound and outbound page must be processed by a proxy server, this can often lead to slow page loading. And because the proxy server tries to remove or bypass any suspicious elements on the returned web page, many pages will load with errors.
Make sure you are using a recognized web proxy with a clear privacy policy. There have been cases of malicious hackers setting up fake anonymous web proxies to collect information from unsuspecting clients. When you use a proxy server, information is often transmitted unencrypted, which allows hackers to see things like usernames, passwords, and other sensitive information.
You should also avoid so called "open proxies". These are proxies that claim to have been abandoned and accidentally left “open” for one reason or another. Many of these proxies are traps created by attackers who want to steal personal information. Some open proxy servers actually live on unsuspecting users' computers that are infected with a computer virus.
Now that you know how to hide your IP address on the Internet, it's time to check your web browser settings.
Privacy settings in your browser
There are many simple and effective ways to keep your online anonymity.
Anonymous proxies are a great way to mask your IP address on the Internet, but there is still a lot of information stored on your computer about your web surfing habits. Luckily, you can easily manage your privacy settings right from your web browser.
One of the easiest ways to hide your tracks online is to manually delete your browser history. All web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome allow you to delete your web surfing history.
Follow these instructions to clear your browser history:
- In Safari, go to the History menu, scroll to the bottom and click Clear History.
- In Firefox, open the Preferences window from the Firefox menu. Select the Privacy tab. Go down to the "Personal data" section and click "Clear now".
- In Google Chrome, go to the Tools menu, select History, select a recent website, and click Delete this day's history.
- In Internet Explorer 7 and 8, this process is a little more complicated. Go to support.microsoft.com and follow the instructions there for help.
You can also control how your browser handles cookies. By default, most browsers accept cookies from all sites. You can either completely block cookies, which may prevent you from using certain online banking and shopping sites, or you can only choose to block third-party cookies.
As anonymous web surfing becomes more popular, the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome include special settings for surfing without a trace. By enabling these settings, your browser will not store your browsing history, searches, cookies, download history, or passwords.
Here's how to enable Anonymous Browsing in some of the most popular web browsers:
- In Internet Explorer 8, open a new tab and select InPrivate Browsing.
- In Safari, in the Safari main menu, you can check the Private Browsing setting.
- In Google Chrome, click the page icon next to the URL box and select "Open a new window in incognito mode."
Anonymous registration
Many free and subscription websites require you to register before using their services. This usually requires three main things: an active email address, a username, and a password.
Aside from the security risks associated with providing your email address and other personal information to a random website, many people just don't want every website they visit to know who they are, and certainly not how contact them.
For security reasons, experts recommend that you do not use the same username and password to access all of your websites and services. The danger, of course, is that one of them will locate - either maliciously or accidentally - hand your information to the identity of the thieves, who will use your universal username and password to access your internet bank account or other highly sensitive web services.
Another nuisance is that many websites have no problem selling your information to third parties, who then spam your inbox. Some sites allow you to opt out of receiving emails from partners, but it's not always clear which checkboxes should be checked or unchecked.
If you don't want to share your real email address with every website that requires registration, you can always create multiple email accounts using free services like Yahoo! Mail or Google Mail. For most websites, the only real purpose of an email address is to confirm registration, so it's okay if you never check your email account again.
However, if you register with many different websites and want to keep track of all your different usernames, passwords, and email addresses, then don't create an Excel or Word file or save it to your computer. If someone can access this file, they will have more than enough information to steal your identity.
The best solution is to use a secure web service like ShopShield or Anonymizer. These services automatically generate temporary email addresses with unique usernames and passwords for whatever site you want. Each time a new email message arrives at one of these temporary accounts, it is purged of viruses and spam and then forwarded to your real email address. You can also delete unneeded accounts with the click of a button.
Another smart solution is the BugMeNot.com website, where users post usernames and passwords for free to share popular websites like newspapers and video sharing sites. If the username and password stop working, it loses in the list.
For more information on Internet privacy and Internet mechanisms, follow the links on the next page.
