Anonymizer

An “anonymizer” (also called an “anonymous proxy”) is a tool that makes your Web navigation untraceable. When you surf the Web with a Web browser (e.g., Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, or Nautilus), you connect to servers that display the sites that you visit. When a server accepts your request for content, it registers information about your location, called an IP address. Every machine connected to the Internet has a unique IP address. Therefore, when you visit a Web site, the site is able to identify you with some level of certainty.

An anonymizer is a way of “fooling” the destination server by making it think that you are somebody else, namely the anonymizer server. Anonymizer servers are located on the Internet at a location that is not traceable to you. You configure your Web browser to use the anonymizer as a proxy, so that all requests to Web pages are done through the anonymizer server. For example, if you want to see Yahoo News, your computer requests the Yahoo News Web page from the anonymizer, and then the anonymizer asks Yahoo for the page. In this way, the Yahoo server receives a request from the anonymizer server, not your computer.

Anonymizers bill themselves as the best tool for protecting your identity; however, your IP address does not give companies much information, and therefore they generally do not store them. Your privacy is more likely to be compromised by other activities, such as filling out forms on the Web with personal information.

On the other hand, an anonymizer can be very effective in protecting you against pharming attacks. Since they are positioned in the middle of the communication, anonymizers can prevent you from displaying a page, acting like a firewall. The anonymizer thus protects you by intercepting malicious files that otherwise would target your computer.