Browsing Securely – Is it Possible?

Have you ever felt like you’re being watched online, well that’s because you probably are. If you want some form of secure web browsing to maintain your privacy then you are not alone. The ordinary person browsing the web is a target for virtually everyone. At the moment there are numerous pieces of legislation targeting the poor ISPs because they have a complete list of all our web browsing, emails, and anything you do online. Identity thieves want this information as well, yet they also have other methods of stealing your information online.

One of these methods involves using anonymous proxies, lots of people think that finding a free online anonymous proxy and surfing through that will make you secure. Well I’m afraid the opposite is generally the truth, many of these servers are run by identity thieves across the world, it’s an easy way to steal account names by having people send them directly to you.

Let me clarify a couple of points before you can research further. From the moment you fire up your browser, your privacy is at risk.

1) When you type in a web address in your browser, it is instantly sent out in clear text. The first place it is logged is in your ISP where you’ll find the most complete list of someone’s online activity.

2) The web site you visit also logs your IP address before sending you the information.

3) The vast majority of all your internet traffic is vulnerable throughout their journey, remember it’s virtually all clear text.

So anyway if you’ve already found a free, fast proxy I suggest you be very careful about using it, find out who runs it and more importantly why are they funding the large bills for free!

Anyway the solution to proper anonymity and protecting your data online can be summarised in one word – encryption. Without the protection of encryption, your privacy is always at risk. Without a trusted secure proxy and encryption, you’ll never have any protection online.

You can achieve this in a variety of ways, if you have the technical knowledge you can do it yourself for a small cost. Check out the TOR and SSLTunnel projects for a start, combining these with your own proxy would be a very good start. There are some commercial options, if you want a professional solution be careful some are little more than a VPn on a shared server. Don’t end up using some cheap VPN service run by a couple of teenagers off a shared web hosting plan.

Anyway good luck on your search for privacy, here’s a free demo of the service I use,

demo here