Anonymous Surfing - Keeping Your Tracks Covered
If you've been shopping in a computer store recently, you've probably seen a program called Anonymous Surfing or something similar.
What these programs will do is effectively mask your computer from the internet, making it much more difficult for your actions to be tracked.
How Do You Surf Anonymously?
There are a few different variations of these programs, but the majority of them work by running all your actions and requests through another location on the internet before they get delivered to the ultimate destination.
For example, if you are posting a message to a forum or message board, everything you send would get routed through this other system before getting posted.
Your computer <-----> Anonymous filter <-----> Destination
As far as the destination computer is concerned, the information came from the anonymous filter, not from you. The filtering computer knows what you sent, so when a reply comes back from the destination, it forwards it along back to you.
The technical term for this is a "proxy server".
Why Should You Surf Anonymously?
When you surf the internet, or post any information anywhere on the internet, your computer has a unique address that can be tracked.
There is also lots of other information that can be tracked. When you go from one website to another, the website you're coming from is normally passed to the new site.
When you leave a site, where you go next can often be tracked as well.
If a website were inclined to put all this information together and create a profile for you, they could track a lot of information without much effort.
It's potentially worse when you bring the search engines like Google into the equation. They can track specifically what you're looking for, what websites you go to when you leave theirs, how long it is before you come back to search again and lots more.
I don't know if they use this information for anything, but the potential is huge for them to create a very thorough profile of your surfing habits over time.
By using an anonymous surfing service, you can effectively hide a lot of this information and make it somewhat less likely that you can be tracked.