The Drawbacks of Anonymous Surfing

BlueCup writes to tell us that one reporter decided to give anonymous web surfing a shot, and found it to be much more trouble than it was worth. Many users take advantage of Tor and other anonymous web browsing tools, but is the amount of hassle worth the effort it takes to remain anonymous?

It depends

[Overzeetop]

on what you're surfing for, and who will be looking at your records in the future. Anon surfing might be a good idea for anyone who ever expects to go into politics, for example.

depends on who you are

[legoburner]

but is the amount of hassle worth the effort it takes to remain anonymous?

Yes if you are going to lose your freedom, or be executed because of it, probably not if you are a general user who does nothing that could ever be used against them, and only use it in instances where you actually need anonymity rather than using it for all activity.

So.

[FireballX301]

This 'reporter' didn't know that he had to sacrifice a bit of convenience in order to maintain web anonymity?

What a useless article. You mask your IP and use proxies if you want to become *untraceable*. And this guy's crying about how he has to remember his passwords for every site. Bloody lout.

Not truly anonymous surfing

[smooth wombat]

After reading the article and digestig what the reporter wrote, he wasn't being very anonymous even with his efforts. Sure, he deleted his cookies when he was done (I do too) but he never removed all his cache files which could be used to track you. Yes, this will increase the time it takes for a page to load but since apparently everyone but me uses a high-speed connection, waiting that extra half second doesn't seem to be that much of a hassle.

Also, since he had to relogin when he went to Amazon or other sites, he was giving up his anonymity because now the site can track when he last visited, what he went to and so forth.

As far as sites balking that he didn't have a cookie, um, so what? That is the whole point of trying to be anonymous, right?

Had the author simply stuck with sufing around and not registering with sites he would have a better case for his article. As it stands, not so much. He needs to look up the word anonymous and see why he wasn't.

Typical

[Who235]

Anonymous surfing is first equated with crime, and later a correlation is drawn between a desire for anonymity and Unabomber style, tinfoil hat paranoia.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons not to want your personal information all over the place, barely any of which were touched on in the article.

Re:Moo

[networkBoy]

"Not if you erase history."

you're kidding right?

Even if you erase history your machine is littered with footprints of where you've been, nevermind un-erase utilities.
-nB

Re:Torpark

[adolfojp]

Also, the Tor servers can sometimes be slow to forward packets...

You can always donate to the project.

Dumb reporter

[RPoet]

This reporter is dumb. He declares that he is a fan of convenience and doesn't care much about anonymity. As he found out that anonymity slows things down, he concluded that it's not worth it.

For him, he should add. If all you need anonymity for is so websites can't point personalised ads at you, guess what: you don't want military-grade anonymity through Tor, you want Adblock or Privoxy. While he continues his convenient existance, more and more people rely on Tor for their democratic right to free unpopular speech. Tor may slow you surfing down, but it sure beats political imprisonment or being outed for being whatever is unpopular where you live.

That's the rub though...

[partisanX]

Yes if you are going to lose your freedom, or be executed because of it,

The nature of the internet and the records kept means you could pay for something you did last night, 10 years from now. Take the whole steroid hysteria right now. 3 years ago, if you used andro, you did nothing illegal, it wasn't considered a steroid and was available at practically every health shop. If there is an internet record of you talking about using andro and the great results you got from it now, NOW YOU'RE A STEROID USER WITH A DOCUMENTED HISTORY OF USING, because now it's illegal and considered a steroid. This could happen with just about anything in this nation of partisan embiciles.

The problem with the question of "is it worth it?" is, you don't know if it was worth it for you personally, until you find yourself in circumstances where either doing it saved your ass, or not doing it costs you dearly.

Re:Tracking is good

[plover]

Tracking helps you by targeting information to you based on your activity

What activities do I want tracked? Where does that benefit me? So I get annoying local advertisements, or that I get annoying tech advertisements? In what way is this different from getting annoying generic advertisements?

Here's the real tinfoil hat scenario that has me not liking tracks: what are the chances that an RIAA investigator is paying for Google AdWords targeting the search words "mp3" and/or "download music"? Google will happily spit out the address of everyone who sees the ad, not just those who click on the link. Other services provide "location information" based on an IP address, so the investigator can simply investigate people who are nearby.

Are you still sure being tracked is good?

And what information about my surfing habits are site designers going to use? If I find a "link rich" page, I keep that page around and open and close the children from it in tabs. I never use the "BACK" link on a web page, I just close the tab. What good does it do a site designer to provide ever more fancy navigational devices that I continue to ignore?

Finally, how do you personally decide which sites are "illegal?" It's not illegal to read (or author) a site on "how to grow bacteria" or "how to grown an erythomycin-resistant bacteria." But that same information could be used by terrarists to create a bacteriological WMD. So, if you should happen to surf to a site like that, (even just in a link from Make magazine) your IP address could be recorded, and you could end up attracting Secret Service attention.

Re:It depends

[bogado]

The problem is that it is hard to decide what is risk if everyone discover you personal habits. Would you lost job if your boss find out about your habit of browsing slashdot in working hours? Would you get in trouble with the wife, if she found out about that porn site you browsed the other day? What about that group of crazy fanatic religious people that found out that you deserve to go strait to hell because you visited a pastafarian website, will they attempt to kill you to speed things up? You never know who will be offended, disgusted or simply harm you because you don't have the exact same opinion on something, and even though you have a free goverment now it dosen't mean that tomorrow it will still be free.

Re:Torpark

[grimdonkey]

Or run a tor node yourself. It's no hassle and you would be of great help.
As other posters already said, some sites ban tor exit node ips. You can just run your server as a middle-node or restrict acces to those certain sites (slashdot, gsmarena amongst others).

Re:Moo

[MooUK]

Undelete utilities are of considerably LESS use if the information was never written to disk in the first place.

Re:Torpark

[Skreems]

Why would you use Tor with services such as a bank website and PayPal, which already know who you are?

Re:Torpark

[Lucractius]

id mod you up but instead ill further highlight my agreement.

WHY would you want to risk firther exposure of such sensitive details as your bank acount login by adding ANOTHER leg to its journey out to the bank. If you dont trust your lan, you can use a vpn or ssh tunnel to somewhere better (something i commonly do, especiauly when im using wireless networks, ssh to a wired box, then (for wireless at least) re-ssh again to another wired one from there (a little bit better incase anyone gets my auth over the wireless))

Using a tor server for your most confidential information that is so connected to you as to the level that the parties involved are in posetion of your bank details and phone number and address, is rediculous, unless your the kind of person that uses fake deails of the type above, is constantly moving, and realy doesnt want the bank to know where your using the computer from, WHY THE HELL would you anonymize your logins to these.

To the companies it raises massive red flags, as you experienced first hand what they do its clear they act on such behaviour. If you dont trust your bank, dont bank there.

And ill point out that placing a software routing point between you and your end point, you do increase the potential for man-in-the-middle attacks on your sensitive login information significantly.