Anonymous surfing always means giving up on comfort

By Sebastian Knoppik Sep 26, 2010, 18:21 GMT

Berlin - When you travel about the internet, you end up leaving behind traces. And that includes more than just user comments in forums or online networks like Facebook.

However impersonal it might seem, there's nothing anonymous about completely normal surfing. There are two options to conceal your identity while surfing, but both mean less convenience.

Website operators can detect, for example: the region from which their site is being accessed; which internet provider the visitor is using; and whether that user has visited the site before.

That same webmaster can also typically view which browser and operating system are being used and other technical details about the user's computer. To a webmaster, the IP address is also visible for every visitor to a website.

Is this a big deal? In the opinion of privacy policy advocate Sandra Mamitzsch, internet surfers should guard their privacy carefully.

'Simply put, it's nobody's business what you're doing on the internet,' the spokesman for the Study Group on Data Retention says. The reasons for this becomes obvious if you consider someone who wants to discreetly review pages on AIDS or pregnancy.

There are a number of ways for website operators to gather the data.

'When you call up one single page, content from multiple providers is often loaded at the same time without the user realizing it,' explains Dennis Pietsch, who runs a website on anonymous surfing.

Ad banners, videos, and sometimes even images are frequently integrated into one website but stored on external servers, Pietsch explains. 'These servers are also contacted when the page is called and can record the referring IP address,' he says.

Pietsch cites the Google Analytics service as an example: 'The free service is offered to webmasters to let them analyse data related to their visitors.' The point of contention is that the data is stored centrally on the search engine company's servers. In Germany, for example, roughly 12 per cent of domains use Google Analytics.

There are a variety of techniques that can be used to guard against revealing too much information on the web.

'There is unfortunately no optimal way to surf the internet anonymously. Each method has advantages and disadvantages,' says Holger Bleich, an editor at German computer magazine c't.

The current crop of browsers offer settings for anonymous surfing. 'This ultimately only ends up preventing your own computer from recording where you surf and stops cookies from being saved. The traces that you leave behind on the internet are details that the browser itself can't stop,' Bleich says.

Another option is programmes and services to direct internet traffic through so-called proxy servers.

'The websites you visit in that case only ever see the IP address of that proxy server,' Bleich says. This prevents web shops from recognizing repeat visitors, for example.

'Law enforcement agencies can still determine the identity of the users in some cases, since the proxy servers store that data,' says Bleich.

The fact that prosecutors or even companies try to determine the identity of a user is not that unusual, Bleich says.

'Even the relatively harmless transgression of using a swap bazaar can lead to the copyright holders pursuing the identity of the user behind a specific IP address from the state prosecutor's office,' Bleich notes.

The German Supreme Court recently overturned that country's law of data retention. Even so, 'most providers tend to store the data for at least a few years,' says privacy advocate Mamitzsch. This means that the data can potentially be requested from the provider within that timeframe.

The safest way to ensure that no data is collected by websites involves a heavy layer of protection. 'To protect your own identity effectively when you're surfing the web, you need the TOR and JAP anonymisation services. The page requests are then broken down and fed across multiple servers to the point where it's no longer possible to see where they originated,' Bleich says.

True anonymization carries with it one serious problem: Transfer speeds are significantly decreased as a result of the multiple redirections. 'Downloading large files can then become an unbearable trial of patience,' Bleich explains.

Pietsch also sees convenience as mutually exclusive with anonymity: 'Put all of the tricks for anonymous surfing into practice and you'll be surfing the same way they did back in the early days of the internet.'