Freedom of Speech. Freedom of expression. Privacy.
Are those important things for you? If yes, you have to think about your Internet connection.
Every time you surf the Internet, your IP address is publicly visible to everyone on target network resources, therefore, your actual location and even name and age can be tracked as well.
Let's start with cookies:
Cookies have become the most recognized privacy risk, because, although some organizations use cookies for legitimate purposes, there are also misuse. For example, tracking everything you visit and do on Internet, companies can create your web profile and based on this, direct publicity for your.
It is not wrong, but not desirable for most of people. The pages you read tell marketers what junk to push on you.
But, worse, cookies sometimes is used with cross-site scripting or of other techniques to steal information from a user. That's why people turn off cookies options in their browsers.
To disable cookies in Mozilla:
- Open the Edit menu.
- Select Preferences to open Dialog box.
- Select the Privacy & Security to open sub-menu.
- Select the Cookies item. Select "Block cookies".
- Click "OK".
To disable cookies in some IE versions (3.x, 4.x and 6.x):
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.x users can disable or warn for cookies by clicking the "View" menu, "Options", "Advanced" and select "Never accept cookies" or "Warn me before accepting cookies".
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x users can disable cookies by clicking the "View" menu, "Internet Options", "Advanced" and select "Never accept cookies" or "Warn me before accepting cookies".
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x users can disable or manage their cookie settings by clicking the "View" menu, "Internet Options", and selecting the "Privacy" tab.
But, and your IP address? Can you hide it?
- With a visible and public IP address you are under risks like:
- Spyware
- Web bug (HTML-enabled email)
- Social engineering
- Phishing
How can you protect your privacy?
You could use an Anonymous Proxy Servers, as you can read
here (only in portuguese).
But, there are great products in the market that make all the boring working for you, automatically.
They have great features:
- anonymous web surfing
- hiding of your real location
- support for all your favourite applications
- hacker, virus and spy ware protection
- fully automatic configuration
But, keep in mind that anonymity can have dramatic effects, both useful and harmful.
