Anonymous Surfing

In truth you can never be 100% sure of your internet privacy. There are many reasons for other people to breach that privacy and gain information from your PC. Their motives vary but some people will go to great lengths to make anonymous surfing impossible.

So what kind of information do those people want? Here are some examples:

- User ids and passwords to bank accounts, online game accounts, online services, etc.
- Your IP adress and security settings to see if they can hack your PC
- Your e-mail adress so they can send you spam (mainly advertisements)
- Your surfing habits including keyword searches, visited websites and favourite websites (stored in your browser)

Regardless of their motives these are the main threats web surfers face today and what makes complete internet privacy and anonymous surfing extremely difficult to ensure.

To accomplish their goal and steal the above mentioned information, they use so called spyware. Spyware are programs designed to extract specific information from the infested PC turning anonymous surfing into non-anonymous surfing. Some spyware programs are also known as keyloggers. As the name suggests they record keystrokes and this is one way of obtaing user ids, passwords or the keywords you regularly use when searching the internet. Once those keywords have been recorded and sent back to a third party, they can be used to tailor specific ads to your personal interests making you more responsive towards future spam mails. Very sneaky and a clear violation of your internet privacy.

The various websites adresses you visit are stored (or cached) on your PC. A spyware program can easily snatch those URLs and send them to a third party, who again can use that information to determine exactly what kind of personal interests you may have and send ads, that would appeal to you. We are indeed far away from total anonymous surfing.

As you can imagine, personal information on your PC that seem harmless suddenly becomes a valuable commodity, that can be sold to unscrupulous people. Those kind people will always create a demand for hackers who will keep finding new ways to invade your internet privacy and destroy any possibility for anonymous surfing

There is another twist to the term internet privacy - a fairly new concept called online reputation. Anyone surfing the web constantly leave traces of their presense in the form of cookies, sign-ups to newsletters, profiles in various communities, etc. If you were able to gather all that information about a single person an categorize it, you are actually able determine an online reputation. Suddenly anonymous surfing seems completely unatainable but what does that matter, if your online reputation is good?

So why should you care about anonymous surfing and your online reputation? The answer is actually simple. More and more people use the internet to find information about other people. Again they have different motives. It could be a company that are looking to hire someone who use the internet to research applicants, checking out their background and such. Some educational institutes may do the same with regard to new candidates. These are very valid reasons to check up on your online reputation and that way you may find that anonymous surfing is indeed an illusion and internet privacy is reduced to what is stored on your own PC.

If you are concerned about what you child is doing on the internet or what other people are presenting your child with, it may also be prudent to monitor his or her online reputation too.