Internet Security ABC - Internet Anonymizers - Why and When You Should Use Them

Internet Anonymizers - Why and When You Should Use Them

Anonymizers are nifty pieces of software that let an Internet surfer visit web sites without having information gathered on them, such as which sites they visited. Anonymizers disable pop ups and cookies, and serve to conceal the IP address of the surfer. Most of them use a proxy server to process each HTTP request. When the user clicks a link or types a URL into a browser, the anonymizer retrieves and displays the information from its own server. The requesting server will receive information from the service and not the surfer, who remains anonymous.

Reasons for using anonymizers are to protect the user's privacy and to bypass the blocking applications that would prevent access to various web sites or parts of web sites that the user wishes to visit. The U.S. Naval Research Labs and Lucent's Bell Labs have pioneered

the anonymous web surfing, and several commercial services are available.

Some of the services available pass the requests made through a series of encrypting loops, others use personal encryption software, and some run without encryption of any kind, but a variety are available depending on a web surfer's needs. The popularity of anonymous web surfing services and software are similar to the way caller ID developed with telephone systems, followed immediately by call blockers that made anonymous telephone calls popular. Many of the anonymous sites work even better than caller ID and call blocker because they allow an individual to take on a totally different identity. The persona chosen is interfaced with and covers over the persona of the web surfer, providing total information anonymity. The web site you visit will never know you were there.

One of the popular uses for this type of thing is for competing businesses to check up on each other without the competition knowing they were there. Another use would be to check on web sites that are political in nature. Some political web sites can be extreme in their views. Many people are interested in what they have to say, but don't want to take the chance of getting on someone's mailing list and receiving Spam, especially from someone they may think is a nut. Using an anonymizer gives them that option.

The first anonymizer on the Internet was called Anonymizer.com, and it was developed in 1997 by Lance Cottrell while engaged in Ph.D. studies in astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego. He was a well known privacy advocate who also developed a widely used remailer called Mixmaster. Cottrell also established the Kosovo Privacy Project to let people use anonymizer services to report from the war zone in Kosovo in the late 1990's without fear of retaliation. Many other anonymizers have followed him, many of them very popular, and many free.

A web surfer can visit every site anonymously by making an anonymizer the computer's home page, and visiting all web sites from there. Bookmarks and favorites can be anonymized by prefixing the URL's with the anonymizer site's address. If you visit a web page through your anonymizer and bookmark it then it will be anonymized when you visit it in the future. A person can also visit web sites that require passwords without revealing any other information.

While anonymizers protect your identity during normal web surfing, they do have a few limitations. Anonymizers cannot usually process secure protocols, such as https: Also plug-ins may get around them. If you access a site that invokes a plug-in it may or may not establish direct connections with your computer that are, or are not anonymized. Also, while all anonymizer sites claim that they don't keep logs of your surfing, some sites keep a log of all addresses accessed. However, they don't keep a log of your connection with the site. Also Java is not totally compatible with anonymizer applications. Active X is able to access your computer after you initially sign up for it, so anonymizers will not necessarily stop Active X applications. However, for most standard uses anonymizers will provide the privacy protection that the average web surfer needs and desires, and will work well for most people.

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