How to Surf Without Leaving a Trace

Worried that someone may be looking over your shoulder--in the virtual sense--as you browse the Web? If so, you don't have to be an online agoraphobe any longer: New tools from old hands in Web privacy will let you surf with complete anonymity.

A certain degree of paranoia about the Web is justified. Advertisers track Web surfers all the time, planting cookies that track you as you surf from site to site so they can see what you want and where you go.

Proxy servers, such as the Safeproxy CGIProxy, have been around for years. These sites open another site, say, Amazon.com, in a pane of the proxy. That way, Amazon won't see your IP address and the proxy can block ads and some cookies.

But proxy sites still allow destination sites to implant some ad cookies and Web bugs--the two most common tracking devices--on your system. Worse, many proxies are just too slow.

New browser plug-ins block far more than just your IP address. Both Anonymizer.com's Private Surfing ($30 per year, limited-feature free version) and Zero-Knowledge's Freedom WebSecure ($50 per year) promise to make you invisible to everyone on the Internet. Each product will encrypt transmissions between your computer and Web sites, scramble URLs so that they can't be seen by administrators, disable the tracking function of cookies (while still letting them save preferences or perform automatic log-in at Web sites that use cookies for those purposes), and block some--though not all--advertising banners and graphics.

The plug-ins work only with Internet Explorer versions 5 and higher. Anonymizer's plug-in is compatible with versions of Windows from 98 through XP; a Zero-Knowledge spokesperson tells me that its tool can't run on some installations of Windows 98 and Me, but that it works well with Windows 2000 or XP.

The two plug-ins behave similarly: After a short download, each service adds a small button to Internet Explorer's toolbar that toggles the application on and off. Private Surfing and Freedom WebSecure both generate a toolbar at the top of your Web browser window. Once you log in with your user name and password, the software becomes active and you can surf anonymously to your heart's content.

Related services from these companies in the past offered anonymous surfing, but at a snail's pace. The new versions are dramatically faster. Freedom WebSecure seemed positively peppy, while Anonymizer still was a bit slower than unprotected surfing because of its encryption.

If you're concerned about the bread-crumb trail you leave across the Internet as you browse the Web, either of these tools can sweep those crumbs away and keep profilers off your back.

Andrew Brandt is a senior associate editor for PC World. He can be reached at consumerwatch@pcworld.com.