Of late there is lot of hue and cry over the news on facebook timeline and its new privacy policy. If you are worried about your privacy, there are few more reasons to do the same. There are many other websites, which may use your personal data. After so many year’s of browsing history, you have shared your privacy, intentionally or unintentionally, to many websites. But hereafter, let us hide our identity by doing anonymous browsing over the internet.
Let us dig deep on this and find out how to hide IP address over the internet and perform an anonymous browsing. Whenever, we search in a search engine e.g. google, bing etc our search keywords, our IP and associated details get stored with in the database of the search engines. The motive behind this data gathering is 1) To make the search result more user friendly based on user requirements and 2) Monitory gain - To use your data as a basis of online marketing or in survey. So, when you search a particular word(s), and visit a particular site, your search criteria is sent as a part of header information. Thus, not only the search engine, but the visiting sites also come to know about your search word(s) and preferences. Over and above, while you connect to another website, your IP gets recorded. And as you know that all the IPs are geo-tagged, your location can easily be identified. Along with the location, your service provider also can be easily identified in most of the cases. Most of the search websites gather this data and store it in their database. When this data leaks out, it can be used for unscrupulous activities. This is popularly known as identity theft.
Now let us see how can we do anonymous browsing i.e. how to hide IP address.
In its version 9 of Internet explorer, Microsoft has implemented Tracking Protection. As per Microsoft’s statement for IE version 9,
“You can install aTracking Protection Listfrom a provider you trust or enable your personalized list. Internet Explorer 9 uses the Tracking Protection Lists as a guide to block or allow third-party tracking.”
There are also options for searching any contents securely. When you use the SSL i.e. https for searching any content, no one can interrupt your search terms, while it is sent from your machine to the search engine. The search engines then send you back the information in a secured manner. However, when you click on a particular site in the search result, though the search engine doesn’t provide the search terms to the target website, it reveals the referrer i.e. your IP related details are disclosed to the target site. However, the referrer information is still a part of encryption and hence no one can intercept the message in between. But remember that irrespective of type of protocol you used, most of the search engines including Google log your information in their database in the same manner and hence in true sense, it is a partial anonymous browsing.
In case, you don’t want the search engines to store your data, you have some other options to do anonymous browsing. There are few search engines and free anonymous proxy, which can cover you from this personal information tracking without storing any of your personal data. These websites generally reroute your search in such a way that the search terms don’t reach the destination website. These search engines also hide the IP address and allow you to do an anonymous browsing over the internet. You may check out some of the serach engines as given below
Websites enabling Anonymous Browsing:
DuckDuckGo – Supposed to be the most famous no-track search engine. Website is http://duckduckgo.com/
HideMyAss – Uses free proxy to do anonymous browsing over the net. Website is http://www.hidemyass.com/
Ixquick and startpage – Both are part of the same company. Website urls are https://startpage.com/ and https://www.ixquick.com/.
Yippy – Website address is http://search.yippy.com/
Yauba – Yauba is a search engine of Indian origin, which stores no data and you can browse anonymously. The site link is www.yauba.com
Photo Courtesy - Virgilio Aleman
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