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Cover Your
Online Trail
You Can Become
A 'Surfer Anonymous'
Sometimes
you want to go where everybody knows your name, but on the
Internet, more people may know you than you know. Does it bother
you to be greeted personally when you log on to a Web site
you’ve visited only once before? If so, take an extra step or
two to cover your tracks online.
Secure
But Not Private
In cyberspace terms, there’s a subtle distinction between
security and privacy, even though the two topics naturally
overlap. If you buy a book or a video or an airline ticket online,
will your credit card number be protected from unauthorized users?
Is anybody reading the love sonnets you e-mail to your sweetie? Is
your system protected from viruses? Is your hard drive protected
from prying eyes? All of these are questions of security. Such
questions generally are addressed through technological safeguards
such as passwords, user IDs, identity authentication, and data
encryption.
Privacy, for this discussion, asks an additional set of questions.
Can you be reasonably confident that your credit card number is
secure? Are your purchasing habits being analyzed by marketing
companies that want to target you with advertisements about other
products and services? Are you sure your secret Web-fed vices are
really secrets, or that your anonymous newsgroup postings are
really anonymous?
It’s no secret that many Web sites collect personal information
about the people who surf them. “As was true in 1998,” wrote
the FCC (Federal Trade Commission) in a special report to Congress
in May 2000, “[our year] 2000 Survey results show that Websites
collect a vast amount of personal information from and about
consumers.”
Sometimes there isn’t much you can do about this, especially if
you want to avail yourself of the information or services a
particular Web site has to offer. But you always have a choice
about what you wish to reveal about yourself, and to whom, and
there are ways to protect your privacy online.
Toss
Your Cookies
Many Web sites, the vast majority of online retailers, for
example, send cookies, or bits of code, to your
hard drive to collect and/or store data about visitors. In the
first case, cookies are strictly reconnaissance agents, retrieving
data, such as the operating system and Web browser you are using,
and returning it to the site. In the second case, the site may
plant a cookie in your PC to identify you when you come and go.
Most often, cookies add value to your surfing experience. For
example, a site might let you customize its features by planting a
cookie containing information you entered about your personal
preferences. Sites with online ordering systems, such as
Amazon.com, attempt to add convenience by using cookies that
contain information you’ve knowingly supplied, such as your
credit card number or the items you’ve placed in your virtual
shopping basket.
Cookies can also be used to uniquely identify you by collecting
information that you haven’t necessarily supplied knowingly,
such as the IP (Internet Protocol) address of your computer.
Further, if you filled out a registration form with personal
information, your name and e-mail or regular mailing address, for
example, the site almost certainly maintains this information in a
database. Theoretically, then, the site can match your IP address
with your personal information. Armed with this intelligence, the
site can track your activity across the Web, analyzing your
interests by interpreting your individual surfing habits.
The technique just described, called profiling,
often is used to target consumers with banner ads or e-mails
related to profiled online activity. Alternately, a site may sell
this information to third-party advertisers. Have you ever
wondered how all those unsolicited ads ended up cluttering your
e-mail inbox? Now you know.
There are a variety of ways you can manage cookies to enhance your
anonymity. First, a slight tweak of your Web browser’s settings
will let you manually accept or reject any cookie a Web site tries
to plant in your system.
If you use Netscape Navigator, go to Edit, Preferences and click
the Advanced heading in the Category window. Under the Cookies
section, check the box labeled Warn Me Before Accepting A Cookie
box. You can dispense with cookies altogether by selecting the
Disable Cookies radio button. Be aware, however, that if you
disable cookies, you’ll lose out on many of those cookie-driven
value additions we mentioned.
In Internet Explorer, click the Tools menu, Internet Options, and
click the Security tab from the ensuing dialog box, select
Internet, and click the Custom Level button. On the menu that
appears, scroll down the Cookies heading and click either the
Disable or Prompt option.
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In Preferences, select settings so your system
warns you before a Web site deposits a cookie on your PC.
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You can easily rid yourself of any cookies
you’ve already acquired by modifying your browser’s data
files. Netscape Navigator maintains a text file called Cookies.txt
in the folder designated for your user profile. You can delete all
existing cookies by deleting this file. Or you can open the file
in a text editor to manually identify and delete individual
cookies. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, generally maintains
a folder of individual cookie files in the WINDOWS directory. If
you go to your WINDOWS directory and find the folder titled
COOKIES, you can delete these files individually or en masse.
There also are a number of software packages designed to help you
manage cookies automatically. To name just one example, CookiePal
1.5 by Kookaburra Software (http://www.kburra.com),
is a $15 shareware program that lets you automatically accept or
reject cookies from only those sites you specify in advance
(saving you the hassle of clicking through the hundreds of cookie
warnings your browser is likely to dole out over the course of any
average hour-long surfing session). You can add or subtract sites
from your cleared-for-cookies list as you see fit.
'Proxymity'
You can choose how much personal information you disclose through
online surveys and registration forms, but any time you access a
Web site, behind the scenes, the site’s server and the server at
your ISP (Internet Service Provider) trade technological nuts and
bolts, such as the operating system and browser you are using, the
Web site you came from, and the path of IP address that led you
there. Though such information can be innocuous in common
practice, it is often logged by the inquiring server and
theoretically can be used to trace at least a slim path back to
you, the user.
Give yourself another layer of anonymity by using a proxy server.
A proxy server acts as a shield between you and the Web sites you
visit; the site “sees” only information about the proxy
server, not about you.
Popular software programs, such as Anonymity 4 Proxy 2.5 by
iNetPrivacy Software (http://www.inetprivacy.com)
help you disappear into the crowd while you browse. The $35
Anonymity 4 Proxy comes with its own database containing hundreds
of anonymous proxy servers worldwide. If you have a particular
site in your sights, the software helps you find the anonymous
proxy server that will provide quickest access to the site.
Anonymity 4 Proxy also lets you block cookies and modify the
information your browser sends to Web sites.
You also can find a good, reliable, and free proxy service through
the Anonymizer (http://www.anonymizer.com).
To use Anonymizer, type the URL (universal resource locator) for
the Web site you wish to visit or access the site directly from
anywhere on the Web by typing http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/
before the Web site’s URL in your browser’s address
field.
If you’re curious to find out just how much information a Web
site really can collect about you just for visiting, you might
want to click the Here’s What WE Know About YOU link on
Anonymizer’s home page. When we did, Anonymizer.com traced us as
far as the names, addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses
of contact officials at our ISP.
Anonymizer’s pages load slowly at times, and ironically, the
free version of the service has its very own banner ads. You can
avoid both for $15 per quarter for the Premium Surfing service.
E-mail
By Remail
E-mail can be one of the fastest ways to leave a virtual paper
trail leading all the way to a spammer’s database or to a
newsgroup where you thought you were using e-mail to post an
anonymous message.
You can preserve your anonymity even when sending e-mail by using
a remailer. A remailer functions something like a
proxy server for e-mail. If you want to send an anonymous,
politically-charged posting to a newsgroup, for example, you can
send the message to a remailer service, which strips the message
of all data that could identify you and forwards the message on to
its destination.
You can find a good, current list of anonymous remailers
maintained by Heinz Tschabitscher at About.com (http://email.about.com/internet/email/msub33.htm).
Watching your cookies, surfing by proxy, and using a remailer for
sensitive e-mail can add layers of anonymity to your Web. If
you’d like to learn more, we recommend the vast and informative
collection of resources at the privacy Web site maintained by the
Center For Democracy & Technology (http://www.cdt.org/privacy).
It won’t even offer you a cookie while you’re there.
by Sean Doolittle
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