Surf the Web anonymously

Your personal information has become big business on the Web.

Most online companies count each registered user's personal info as a valuable asset. If you're registered somewhere, you have a price on your head. But there are ways around that. Beyond the creepy feeling of knowing your personal information is being used as a commodity, registration is annoying. You can choose not to register, but sometimes that means not getting the content you want, say, at the New York Times Web site.

Whether you register or not, sites usually track you and collect your information through cookies. There are several ways to get around all of this tracking. I'll talk about a couple of them here.

Anonymous registration
A site called Bugmenot.com uses a community approach. People are encouraged to submit their logins at registered sites, then those logins are shared. The result is, if you want to read content at a site that requires registration, you just go to Bugmenot.com, type in the URL of the site you wish to read, and get a login and password to use temporarily.

I've tried it at several sites, and it works well. The only downfall is that most of the logins are not activated to post in forums and message boards. That's a good thing and a policy they should adhere to. In fact Bugmenot.com has a long list of terms and conditions that state clearly what is acceptable and what isn't. The site simply wants to protect your identity, not aid you in spamming or committing crimes.

You should think about the fact that this kind of service could be considered stealing. After all, the content sites are giving you the content you'd otherwise pay for, in exchange for your personal info. You're cheating them of valid personal info. It may or may not be technically a violation, depending on the site, so be warned.

Anonymous surfing
But even if you use a Bugmenot.com login, sites can still track your machine through cookies. They just won't know your name and postcode. I couldn't care less about this kind of tracking, but if it bugs you, there are several Web sites that allow you to surf the Web anonymously. The most famous is Anonymizer, which still has a limited free service but works best if you pay.

Plenty of other sites offer anonymous surfing for free. The only one I've used is the Cloak, which offers anonymous, encrypted surfing. The anonymous part blocks Web sites from knowing who visited them; the encrypted part makes sure nobody at your ISP or workplace can find out what URLs you visited.

It doesn't work perfectly. Sites can prevent you from surfing to them through an anonymous service. When I tried to reach Craigslist.org, I got a message that the site was blocked at the request of the owner. Also, not everything works. CNET.com loaded fine, but none of the flash features worked correctly. But most of the time, most of the sites I visited worked well.

Serious anonymity
Anonymous surfing sites aren't foolproof. Some kinds of JavaScript can break the anonymity. If you truly want a guaranteed way to prevent the sites you visit from knowing anything about you, you need to run some software on your side combined with a proxy service. Anonymizer offers this kind of service. Whether you want to protect your private information or not, it's important to know that these kinds of services exist.

Have your own favourite anonymous surfing sites? Think they should be banned? Post your comments below.