Protecting Your Privacy Online, Anonymously
Protecting Your Privacy Online, Anonymously
Sometimes you want people to know who you are, while other times you do not. By default on the Internet, with each and every connection you make you broadcast your location with your public IP address—unless you take steps to protect your identity.
That IP address can be used to track you and your activities ; it can also be used to locate where you are geographically. The Internet is not anonymous.
There are, however, a number of different solutions with which you can hide your real IP address and, in effect, have an “anonymous” Web experience.
Fundamentally, the mechanism by which the anonymous Web experience is achieved is by way of some form of proxy. That is either a proxy client that is installed locally on your own network or PC or one that is available as a browser-based service online. Traffic from your PC is redirected through the proxy making it look to the outside world as if the proxy (which has a different IP address) is where the traffic originated from.
In this review, we look at some of the different options, including Anonymyizer, NetConceal and Vidalia (Tor), as well as a number of online services such as Anonymouse and Megaproxy. We’ll evaluate what works well and what does not to help make you anonymous online.
