Using means to protect your identity doesn't necessarily mean you have something to hide and everyone should have some concern about the way their information is treated.
Why is my identity revealed?
It has to do with the way Internet works. Information on the Internet is distributed in a way similar to a post office. When you send a letter you wright the sender address (your address) and the receiver address. The post office looks at the receiver address and forwards your letter (information) to the correct place. If the recipient wants to replay to you he does the same but this time your address will be the receiver. This works fine except that everyone involved in the process will know that YOU are sending some information to someone.
I am concerned! What can I do?
First we need to make one thing clear - Privacy does not mean your information cannot be seen, it means that you cannot be traced as the origin or the destination of the information. This is very important! Your passwords and other secret information will still be out there, they just cannot be traced back to you.
There are some tools and techniques that can be used to protect you identity. One of these tools is Tor. Tor is not only a tool it is a network of computers that aim to protect the identity of those connected to this network.
It works by creating layers of protection like an onion and so is called Onion Routing. Your information will travel through several machines until it reaches its destiny. The trick here is that every node only knows the node before and the node afters. Lets use the post office analogy again.
You send a letter to a friend (receiver). The letter goes to the post office, they read the destination address and forward it to another post office closer to your friends house. Everything looks the same as before except the post office changes the sender address to its address and the destination address to the next post office. Each station will do this until it reaches you friends house. Sounds confusing? Maybe a picture will help to explain this principle.
Ok... the process is more complicated than this but you can understand the idea here. Tor works in a more complicated way because information still has to travel over the Internet but at the same time it can't reveal your identity.
I believe Tor works very good at maintaining you anonymous. I have installed Vidalia which is a graphical interface to work with Tor. It gives you a simple control panel an comes with a portable Firefox version pre-configured to work with the Tor network. Start Vidalia and you will be working anonymously in no time.
Is there any disadvantage?
Sadly yes. Tor network can sometimes be a bit slow. If you use Vidalia you can press the "New Identity" button and a new path will be generated to you. This sometimes helps with the speed. The other disadvantage is that you cannot (or shouldn't) use Javascript, Flash, streaming and other technologies because they can reveal who you are rendering Tor useless.
Never the less give Tor a try. Do a simple test:
Go to www.whatismyip.com/ (or google "what is my ip") and write down the ip address that is displayed. Then install Vidalia and execute it. Give Tor some time to find a proper path. Open the Firefox version that comes with Vidalia (pre configured to work with Tor) and visit whatismyip.com again. If everything is working correctly you should see your new "identity".
More information about this subject can be found here:
https://www.torproject.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_privacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymity
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/technology/17privacy.html
If you have any questions or opinions about this topic please feel free to drop a line.
No comments:
Post a Comment