There are people who are so concerned about their privacy and their anonymity that they want to remain completely anonymous online, yet they still want to take advantage of what the Internet has to offer. Is that possible?
Well, sort of. To hide your identity on the Web, you have to not only hide your data, but also stay a step ahead of programs that log your activities.
Regarding your data, you must hide your demographics (name, address, city, state, ZIP, phone); your financial data (credit card, expiration dates); and the hardest thing to hide -- your computer (IP address).
From easiest to hardest, let's look at how you can mask this information.
Demographics: You can participate in almost any social media site, from Facebook to Twitter to MySpace, using a fake identity. You are probably violating most terms and conditions, and you are clearly lying when you accept those terms -- but you can do it!
Financial Data: This is simple to do -- don't buy anything. No Amazon, no eBay, no iTunes, and no travel planning. The travel is the most limiting, as in most cases you are going to pay a few extra dollars in fees or commissions to buy your tickets via the phone or at the airport or a travel agency. Of course, if you have arranged a false identify with credit cards under an assumed name and address you can bypass this limitation -- but this article won't teach you those tricks.
Computer ID: Most people don't even know their computer's identify. But every device that connects to the Internet gets an IP address, such as 172.16.254.1. In the days of dialup, you would get a new IP address every time you logged in to the Internet. But now, with high-speed connections to the Internet that stay on 24x7, your home network might have the same IP address for weeks or even months.
Your ISP has the ability to log all of your traffic as it connects you to the various Internet services you visit. Most of your browsing happens in clear text. So everything that leaves your computer and travels across the Web is instantly readable by anyone who should happen to intercept it.
Most ISPs do log this data (this helps comScore Inc. , Quantcast, and other services estimate Web traffic), but it is kept anonymous and tied only to your IP address. However, under court order (or through an unscrupulous ISP employee), your IP address could be tied to your identity.
You can avoid this by using a proxy server, which shields a person’s location and other vital information, instead using its own IP address to link to the Web at your command. Connecting to a proxy server requires some changes to your browser, but you can get software like Invisible Browsing that makes it easy.
But by using software like this you introduce two new security risks. Most are freeware programs: Can they be trusted, or will the software steal your identity? An even greater risk is that the proxy server can log everything you do and actually steal your private information. You might find a trustworthy proxy -- or you might find one managed by a Russian hacker.
Another threat is what you download from the Internet. You need anti-virus software andanti-malware software to ensure you don't download any programs that try to capture data from your computer. Malware can
change the settings on your PC to use a proxy server, as occurred in this instance.
Too many folks think they are "protected" because they use Firefox's new private browsing mode or a utility that deletes all the cookies, history of Websites visited, and temporary files from their PC. This is very effective if you are worried about your family, friends, or co-workers stealing your identity, but this does nothing to bypass the logging by your ISP or your proxy server.
In our digital age, you have to come to terms with the fact that anonymity is gone with the digital wind.
Oh, and we just talked about your computer -- don't forget your cellphone, your kids' Nintendo Wii, or Nintendo DS with WiFi. The number of ways we connect to the Internet is growing every day, and rest assured that the criminal element is among the first to explore and perhaps exploit each new technology.
— David Silversmith, Internet and Web analytics consultant, and former CTO of Carfax
You are right. I oversimplified my opinion. My bad.
I forgot about the dark side of the Internet because what you are talking about stems mostly from social networking and online/offline pornography.
For example, NBC had a show called "To Catch a Predator",
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10912603/ns/dateline_nbc-to_catch_a_predator, where guys go to a house expecting to have sex with underage teenagers. Most of these guys did not appear to be sickos/wackos but acted like them. And this is the tip of the iceberg of the Internet's dark side.
You are making a huge false assumption and generalization about people who desire anonymity on the web.
To be honest and straight up about, there are a whole lot of $#@&%# pyschopaths out there on the internet, and those are on top of the crooks who see the internet as a vast, still largely untapped land of opportunity for their own illegal plans.
I've had personal experience in my past which has shown me exactly how bad it can be with some of them, both the crooks and the psychos. Luckily for me it was nothing extremely serious that I was able to remedy on my own, but it really really opened my eyes to the potential.
A username, google, and small tidbits about various aspects of your life that they trackl and document, and boom, you can end up with a person from the other side of the country showing up at your door and leaving notes, making random phone calls in the middle of the night, taking photos of you around your house, or any other number of strange things, just to harrass you.
The desire for anonymity is not always because someone wants to be up to no good and be involved with something nefarious and illegal, but more often than not, it's to protect themselves from others who are interested in being up to no good.
I'm so sick of people asking "What do you have to hide?". EVERYONE has something to hide. Privacy is a basic human right. That's why in America, it is Constitutionally protected. No, the word 'privacy' is not found in the US Constitution, but the fourth amendment does a pretty good job of describing it in so many MORE words.
Amenedment 4 was important 200 years ago and still is, that's why it's so high on the list. Imagine if government of King George III could 'log the communications' of Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere and Ben Franklin back in 1775. The United States would not exist today, now would it?
We currently have a government that is making the DOCUMENTED assumption that anyone with a 'Choose Life' bumper sticker is a potential domestic terrorist. Imagine the flags that can be raised on your household just by one child's errant or curious URL click!
People wanting to be anonymous on the Internet are 1) wanting to do illegal activity or 2) wanting to do something unethical. The latter tends to be more dangerous because they are arrogant and think they are perfect.
Thanks for the post. Very enlightening. I had not read that before.
Of course, all of this is designed to protect you from others invading your privacy. Unfortunately, we are willing to give up much of our privacy through social networking sites.
It's a choice each of us has to make for ourselves.
while it may be true and accurate that the word privacy does not exist in the U.S. Constitution. However, the concept does exist and is enforceable and has been in forced by the US Supreme Court.
In support of this argument I offer the following:
The Constitution does not specifically mention a right to privacy. However, Supreme Court decisions over the years have established that the right to privacy is a basic human right, and as such is protected by virtue of the 9th Amendment. The right to privacy has come to the public's attention via several controversial Supreme Court rulings, including several dealing with contraception (the Griswold and Eisenstadt cases), interracial marriage (the Loving case), and abortion (the well-known Roe v Wade case). In addition, it is said that a right to privacy is inherent in many of the amendments in the Bill of Rights, such as the 3rd, the 4th's search and seizure limits, and the 5th's self-incrimination limit.
Last time I checked the Constitution did not guarantee any right to privacy.
The issue has been with us since the dawn of time, folks.
In my youth we would challenge each other to put together the most comprehensive dossier on our targets. We would each be assigned a random house and have a couple weeks to gather as much information as we could on the subject. All information had to be backed up with evidence.
The garbage can became the staple for this exercise. From there we would use the findings - bank accounts statements, overdue library notices, etc. to start building the dossier. Phone bills were gold. We would even call the numbers, most often times presenting ourselves as potential employers (always thought I sounded too young to do that, but it worked). It was amazing the information people would give up on their friends to a total stranger on the phone.
Of course looking back, this was definitely wrong to do, but we never did any harm. We always burned the dossier in the end and other than potentially freaking people out - no one was harmed or defrauded.
The bottom line is that unless you live out in the middle of nowhere there is always something about you that can be gathered.
The Internet cuts down on the leg work, though. That's for sure.
One of my former colleagues is about to launch a fee-based private VPN service. I have no doubt that with the right advertising and positioning he'll find loads of customers willing to shell out a monthly fee to hide their online activities. Eventually he's proposing to have his VPN and mail servers hosted in countries with very strict privacy regulations, out of reach of legislation such as the Patriot Act. I wonder if his business is potentially the future of "premium" consumer Internet access, a kind of secondary ISP: your cable, phone or wireless provider gives you the high speed access to the cloud, and the "trusted private VPN" handles your traffic from there.
David, your post is excellent. It is truly an expose on the fact that it is hard to hide your identity as you transact business.
The genie is as previously stated, out of the bottle. As noble a thought as it is to remain anonymous to the interwebs, the only real way to do that is to not post anything legit, but that doesn't make you anonymous, it only makes the actual identity false.
There will come a day when you can't so much as buy a candy bar without the proper authentication, either via the web or at the local five and dime.
Until then, I guess we have to do our best to keep our identity worth keeping, and try to keep others from stealing it for their own purposes.
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