Surf Anonymously Without a Trace
Feel like someone is watching you? On the Web, they probably are. Protect your privacy by using anonymous proxy servers.
Whenever you surf the Web, you leave yourself open to being snooped upon by web sites. They can track your online travels, know what operating system and browser you’re running, find out your machine name, peer into your clipboard, uncover the last sites you’ve visited, examine your history list, delve into your cache, examine your IP address and use that to learn basic information about you such as your geographic location, and more. To a great extent, your Internet life is an open book when you visit.
Don’t believe me? Head to http://www.anonymizer.com/privacytest/. This page, run by the Anonymizer.com web service, tells you what your IP address and machine name are. And that’s just a start. Click on the links on the left side, such as “Exposed Clipboard” and “Geographical Location.” You’ll see just a small sampling of what web sites can learn about you. Figure 4-10 shows a web site reporting on my geographic location. It’s close enough; I live in Cambridge rather than Boston, and we generally require that people turn over their passports at the border.

Figure 4-10. The Anonymizer.com web service, exposing my current geographic location
Much of the reason why web sites can find out this information about you is due to the trusting ...
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