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So, let's talk privacy, and then let's talk about how you haven't got any. That's right, if you are surfing the Internet, and you aren't doing it through some third party proxy server, the sites you surf to can potentially learn everything about you-your habits, your likes and dislikes, your buying preferences and more.
In this way, advertisers can serve up those annoying pop-up ads, spyware can quietly download to your computer in the background and track your every move, government agencies can watch you, and hackers can slither into your hard drive and steal your world.
Paranoid yet?
If you aren't, re-read the the opening to this article slowly. While you are reading it, remember an advertiser's spyware could be phoning in your private information for future use as you read.
What is anonymous surfing? Remember the old punchline, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog?" Well, if you practice Anonymous Web Surfing 101, nobody will know whether you're Fido, the family pet out looking for the latest craze in dog food or the parakeet looking for warmer climes.
But seriously folks, put simply, anonymous web surfing erases any trace or trail of where you've been or going on the Internet.
Your private world remains private and no one, not even your Internet Service Provider (that's the guy you pay $20 to $40 dollars a month to get on the Net) won't have a clue about who you are. This is how it used to be, and this is how it should be. Period. End of story.
Beyond simple paranoia, people have various reasons to surf anonymously ranging from general terror about losing their privacy to wanting to keep their personal surfing sites that they go to on the job away from the prying eyes of their employers.
Beyond the obvious, what are spy websites looking for, and how do they accomplish it. Websites use a variety of methods to gather intel from the most basic which is your IP address to placing cookies on your website.
Your IP address is where you started from, like your home street address. Cookies are little bits of information placed on your computer that keeps track of your habits.
One of the easiest cookies is kept by Internet Explorer, when you visit and log in to a website, IE will ask you if you want it to remember your username and password. If you say yes, it will download a small file with that information to your hard drive. Forever more, or until you clear your cookies in IE, whenever you visit that site, it will automatically fill in your log in information.
Neat, huh? Well that's okay. But what about the cookies that are downloaded that you don't know about. That's where the grey area of invasion of privacy comes in. That's also where anonymous web surfing stops it dead in its tracks.
Sites use a variety of techniques to gather and collate this information, but the two most basic are examining your IP address and placing cookies on your PC. Matching your IP address with your cookies makes it easier for them to create personal profiles. If you'd like to see what kind of information sites can gather about you, head to these two sites, which peer into your browser and report what they find.
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