How to surf anonymously without a trace

Protect yourself: Surf anonymously

The best way to make sure Web sites can't gather personal information about you and your computer is to surf anonymously by using an anonymous proxy server that sits between you and the Web sites you visit.

When you use an anonymous proxy server, your browser doesn't contact a Web site directly. Instead, it tells a proxy server which Web sites you want to visit. The proxy server then contacts the Web site, and when you get the Web site's page, you don't get it directly from the site. Instead, it's delivered to you by the proxy server. In that way, your browser never directly contacts the Web server whose site you want to view. The Web site sees the IP address of the proxy server, not your PC's IP address. It can't read your cookies, see your history list or examine your clipboard and cache because your PC is never in direct contact with it. You're able to surf without a trace.

There are three primary ways to use anonymous proxy servers. You can configure your browser to use a such a server (or get software to do it for you); you can visit an "anonymizer" Web site, which does the work of contacting the server; or you can download software that will ensure your anonymity when you use the Internet. We'll look at how to do each.

Keep yourself anonymous with Tor

The best free software you can find for being anonymous when you use the Web is to use the free Tor. When you use Tor, all your communications -- not just Web surfing, but also instant messaging and other applications -- are in essence bounced around a giant network of Tor servers called "onion routers" until it's impossible for sites or people to be able to track your activities.

Setting up Tor is straightforward. Download a package that includes not just Tor, but other software you need to work with it, such as Privoxy, a proxy program. All the software is self-configuring, so you won't need to muck around with port settings or the like. Tor runs as a small icon in your system tray. To start Tor, right-click it and choose Start from the menu that appears; to stop it, right-click it and choose Stop.

Once it starts, simply use the Internet as you normally would. If you're superparanoid, you can regularly change your Tor "identity" to make it even harder for anyone to track your travels. Right-click the Tor icon, and select "New Identity." That's all it takes.

Tor also includes a nice bandwidth tool that has nothing to do with anonymity but that graphs your bandwidth use. Right-click the Tor icon, and choose Bandwidth Graph. You can see it in action, along with Tor's right-click context menu, in the nearby figure.