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A service that allows surfers to visit
websites without revealing information about themselves or their
computers. Nearly all websites collect information of some kind about
visitors, in particular their IP Addresses, which web servers
need to send track visitors and link E-mail addresses to particular IP
addresses, allowing marketers to identify users and add them to mailing
lists. By subscribing to a web-based anonymity service, users can hide
their IP addresses and prevent websites from installing cookies on
their machine, thus providing them with a greater degree of privacy. Many
anonymisers also prevent well known annoyances such as pop-up
windows.
Anonymisers rely on proxy servers to act as intermediaries
between users and the websites they are trying to visit. Instead of sending
information directly to the site, the anonymising service redirects all
requests for web pages to its own proxy servers, from where the request is
subsequently dispatched. As a result, website owners see only the IP
address of the service, rather than the user, and can theoretically gather
no information about the person or computer actually looking at the site. In
practice, however, a determined site owner can exploit advanced features of
modern web browsers to effectively bypass these services, usually by
using Javascript or special Html tags to collect IP
addresses and silently redirect traffic away from the intermediary. Several
of the most popular anonymisers are vulnerable to these tactics.
The popularity of anonymisers has risen dramatically in line with
the huge volume of unwanted e- mail received by most internet users and an
increasing awareness that their behaviour is being tracked. They are
especially popular with people visiting sites with questionable content,
such as pornography , who hope that their tracks will be covered and
their identities secure. Ultimately, however, anyone with a good reason to
discover those identities (law - enforcement agencies, for example) can
simply recover them from the service, so they are not a safe refuge for
people engaging in illegal online activities. Anonymisers can also
interfere with the normal operation of many useful websites, which may
refuse access to users who disable cookies or pop-up windows. (see also
Remailer). |
