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Surfing in disguise
Services keep your boss and the sites you visit from tracking you 10/24/2002
It's getting harder to remain nobody on the Internet.
Out there on the Web, increasingly sophisticated tools are being used by
sites and marketers to track visitor movements. Back at the office,
about a third of online workers – more than 27 million – have their
Internet or e-mail use under continuous surveillance, the Privacy
Foundation estimates.
"People don't understand," says Bill Unrue, chief executive officer of
Anonymizer.com. "The Internet is the most surveillance-friendly
environment there is."
But companies selling privacy software subscriptions have had a hard
time scaring up customers. In the last year, several large players have
folded shop or turned to strictly business clientele.
It seems people will buy Telezappers and pay to get off telemarketer
lists, but they ignore online equivalents – programs that cloak their
online identities and encrypt communications.
The attitude is reflected in the independent research of the Pew
Internet and American Life Project. Americans want the presumption of
privacy online, but "a great many Internet users do not know the basics
of how their online activities are observed, and they do not use
available tools to protect themselves."
Pew researchers point out that most people never have a harmful
experience online. But computer invasions are often more subtle than
ringing phones but far more intrusive, computer experts say.
With Javascript tricks, Web sites can grab your e-mail address, then
start a spam onslaught. With invisible "Web bug" graphic files, a user
who is simply viewing a page can trigger tracking by ad companies. That
user's Internet address is, quite invisibly, being added to all sorts of
databases.
And in the workplace, job hunters may find employers are documenting
visits to destinations such as
Monster.com. Or they may be inspecting any communication with domains of
competitors.
There are free services, such as
The-cloak.com, still available on the Net, but most are now fee-based.
Fee-based and free applications work essentially the same way. Commands
and communication from your computer terminal are routed through proxy
servers. Your identifying Internet address is altered. The Web page is
channeled back to you for viewing, but with a fake identity sent to the
Web server.
Within that process, other privacy-related walls can be added. The best
services are sold by a dwindling set of companies such as Mr. Unrue's
Anonymizer.com and the recently revived
Freedom.net from Zero-Knowledge Systems.
The $29-a-year privacy service, called
Anonymizer Private Surfing 2, lets you surf without giving away personal
information to nosy Web sites. Users interested in even higher security
can pay $99 annually to route all of their Internet communications
through Anonymizer.
By creating a private network between a customer's PC and its servers,
Anonymizer offers complete encrypted delivery of all e-mail and instant
messages.
Zero-Knowledge jumped back into business in March after shutting down
late last year. Its
Freedom WebSecure service is priced at $59.95 for a one-year subscription
for consumers, but the company has shifted its attention to bigger
deals. For example, it announced this year that computer maker
Hewlett-Packard would include its products in Pavilion PCs sold in North
America.
In the old days, users of both these services had to log into Web sites
to activate the service. Now, both Zero-Knowledge and Anonymizer can be
triggered from the tool bar.
Within this mechanism, another layer of security can be added at the
customer's end. Both the services can be customized to block ads, stop
or monitor the placement of cookies on your hard drive, and remove
malicious privacy and security threats from Java, JavaScript, VBScript
and ActiveX codes.
Neither software package is probably foolproof. Web tracking, filtering
and surveillance mechanisms grow more elaborate daily. Recently, several
programmers have reported security dangers in Anonymizer and Safeweb.
Anonymizer's technicians repaired 10 reported software flaws within two
days, the programmers say. Meanwhile,
8e6 Technologies of Orange, Calif., claimed its filtering software – used
by libraries, schools and corporations – can thwart use of Private
Surfing 2.0.
Safeweb's structure was
examined and criticized for security flaws in an
exhaustive study by Andrew Schulman of the Privacy Foundation and Boston
University computer scientist David Martin. The company, the researchers
say, did not immediately respond to their discoveries.
Other companies have been driven from the arena or drastically changed
their business models. Most notably, they include
Safeweb.com, which attempted an advertising-supported model. After winning
a PC World award as "Best of the Web" and an investment from the CIA's
venture capital firm,
In-Q-Tel, the company has abandoned its consumer products and
switched to strictly corporate sales.
High-profile ventures such as Enonymous and Privada simply died.
Anonymizer says it has a subscriber base of 500,000, and its leaders
expect sales to climb as Internet users – both corporate and consumer –
grow more educated on privacy issues.
Already, some companies are using the service to hide inquiries that can
return valuable pricing information or other business intelligence.
Others have been able to identify site visits from competitors'
computers and later e-mail back – under cloak – job offers to their
employees. Smart companies use all sorts of Internet tricks, Mr. Unrue
says.
And why not? Mr. Unrue likens Web browsing these days to leaving the
window shades open at night.
"People can see everything you're doing," he says. "That's exactly the
way it is online. Everything's being tracked today."
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