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| The simple act of surfing exposes you to the outside world (or more accurately, to the web site you're connecting to). Although the remote web site is regarded as 'passive' (you are the one who decides which pages to retrieve, where to go, when to leave, etc.), in reality things are a little different. Planting cookies, collecting your e-mail addresses, gathering information about your operating system and IP address are just some of the functions any web site can do. Most of these are inherent in the standard negotiation between browsers and web sites but all of this can be 'anonymized', causing your browswer to reveal as little information as possible about the surfer. |
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Onion Routing contains a very good list of sites that deal with net privacy:
http://www.onion-router.net/Tests.html.
Be sure to try the privacy test sites, each performs certain tests to discover known vulnerabilities or privacy issues concerning anonymous surfing.
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There are several solutions for limiting the loss of anonymity on the Net. Most of them can be easily performed without the aid of any program: Cookies can be easily disabled; personal information can be hidden (for example, tell your browser not to send your e-mail as an anonymous FTP password).
Actually correct configuration of the browser can usually accomplish most of the work. To completely go 'under cover', you can surf through a 'web anonymizer' service to hide who you are and where you came from.
To see what your web browser tells the world, take a look at: http://privacy.net/analyze/. This page will performed a thorough analysis and let you know what other already know about you.
Another such web page is Snoop (http://www.onion-router.net/dynamic/snoop), but Snoop also does some interesting tests for known browser vulnerabilities.
A new start-up company called Privada is promising to deliver a product called WebIncognito - a product that is suppose to achieve complete anonymity for 5$ a month.
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