Privacy services - why they are becoming important to online security

Imagine for a moment that you are an FBI agent charged with investigating a site involved in criminal activities. The web site fronts as a legitimate online business selling a variety of products to increase computer security. In truth the business is used to test new viruses on unsuspecting visitors in order to 'expedient' their product sale.

After a substantial amount of complaints and reports you are charged with investigating the site and figuring out who the person is running this illegitimate business.

Carefully you browse through every aspect of the site looking for some contact information. After a few hours of fruitless searching you decide to go home and take the matter up again in the morning (it's just a web site after all).

When you finally make it in to work the next day (traffic is a killer) and resume your search you notice the web site you were investigating is gone!

What we just experienced was a clear case of 'web-trace-ability'. Any and all actions we make on the web can be tracked recorded and even back-traced (finding out what we did before we went to the site). Not only that but via simple methods in the internet communication standard (TCP/IP & HTTP) our exact computer details, browser details and often name, address, phone number and email address can be recovered.

As an FBI agent we didn't stand a chance, the fact alone that our host (internet provider) is 'fbi.gov' was enough of a tip-off for the web site to inform the owner it was time to pack up and set up camp elsewhere.

To create a basic understanding on how all this private information is retrieved we will take a closer look at the communication standard known as HTTP (hypertext Transfer Protocol). This communication standard (protocol) defines exactly how web servers and browsers are supposed to communicate with each other (otherwise we'd never be able to see a site).

Within this communication standard there are three basic 'methods' to get information about a target computer. This information is needed to establish a proper communication between our browser (like our Internet explorer) and the web server (the PC that contains the web page we want to view):

Remote host
HTTP referrer
HTTP user agent

Remote host

The remote host 'command' (for lack of a more understandable definition) gives the exact information about what page we just visited before the page we are looking at now. If you came to a page via a search engine for example it will reveal the exact wording of your search.

HTTP referrer

The referrer finds the computer's exact Internet address (IP). The IP address of a computer can be the source of all kinds of information allowing other more invasive tools to figure out anything from the name of the owner of the computer to details about email addresses, phone numbers and any other kind of relevant address information.

HTTP user agent

The user agent gives detailed information about our browser. Anything from our browser version to specifics about the computer it is running on (e.g. Operating system and version) can be retrieved through the HTTP user agent.

As a careful FBI agent (or just generally careful person) we would want to keep our private information to be retrieved in the ways described above. As a result we need a way to become completely faceless either revealing no information about us or incorrect information.

But not only FBI agents require a certain amount of anonymity. After all, would you like the world to know about the medical sites you visited for your 'personal' problem? Or would you enjoy knowing that your online shopping habits are monitored and you can soon expect to see your personal information used in market research?

Having established that a certain measure of security is beneficial to most of us we will look at the basic concept to become invisible on the Internet:

The Proxy

The choice we have here is simply called a 'proxy' around which many sites have built themselves to offer any number of Internet 'anonymity' measures. A proxy acts as our own personal agent. We tell the proxy we wish to visit a web site, the proxy then visits the web site and retrieves the information for us. This information is then passed back to us from the proxy.

This means that instead of 'us' having left all our personal information behind on the web site we just visited (or rather the web server it is on) the proxy just left its own personal information behind.

There are a great number of free 'proxy' servers available ranging from Anonymizer to silentsurf but all basically provide the same service (that of a free proxy).

As a result anonymity on the web is no longer impossible; following the simple set-up instructions on the free proxy server site is all it takes to guarantee anonymity from the spying eyes of online marketing experts and potential hackers.