Anonymity and Privacy On The Internet

These days on the internet it has become almost impossible to remain anonymous. Almost every site you visit will want to track you in some way or another. This is usually for advertising purposes and is most commonly done by using cookies. Most of the time they just store your approximate location, a list of visited sites, and a list of keywords. These are then used to show you targeted advertisements that you are more likely to be interested in. Not particularly sinister right? However when you consider the implications of this it is rather disturbing. It is the internet equivalent of them opening up your mail and having a rummage for anything interesting. The worst part is that that this is only roughly the limits of the "legitimate" companies tracking you and looking at your data. There are also websites out there that can place things called supercookies on your computer (unfortunately some "legitimate" companies also do this although it is rare).

Supercookies are cookies that are really difficult or in some cases near downright impossible to get rid of. With regular cookies you have the option to clear them from your computer so that they will stop collecting data about you; supercookies, on the other hand, spread themselves to every place on your computer that they possibly can. If you try to delete the supercookie and it exists anywhere else on your machine then the second the remaining copy of the supercookie is activated it will restore every copy that you had previously deleted. It's like a cancerous tumour: unless you get rid of it all it will just grow back.

Another method that websites can use to track you as an individual is your browser. You may use a very common browser like chrome or firefox, but there are many different ways they can narrow down who you are by the parts of your browser and system. Use any plugins? Have any custom fonts installed? They can check to see how many people have that exact combination of plugins, system fonts, browser, and many other things. The end result is that your fairly unique browser setup can be used to track you as a unique user, and even if your browser is fairly generic they can still check your system fonts, operating system version, etc. there's almost no escaping it. This tracking method means that they can even track you through proxies.

So now comes the big question: Is it actually possible to be truly and absolutely anonymous on the internet? The short answer is no. There is no 100% certain way of guaranteeing that you cannot be tracked on the internet in some way, shape, or form short of cutting yourself off from 99% of the features of all websites (in which case you may as well not be using the internet at all). However there are ways to make it very difficult (and in some cases logistically unviable) for websites and people to track you and trick them into receiving at least some false data. First of all you should disable things like flash and java; if you need them then set them to run only on demand, like if you need to use a website feature that requires flash you could manually unblock that flash element on the page without unblocking any others. Secondly you can use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) or a proxy like Tor to mask your IP address and make websites think that it is different; although this doesn't always work if the site asks your pc to provide its IP address using something like Java. Finally another thing that you can do to feed websites false information instead of yours is to run your web browser off a virtual machine. This way you can have all of your custom fonts, browsers, etc. on your computer but it will only report those on the VM; it will also report your operating system as being that of the VM. There are also other methods of reducing the amount you are tracked like using plugins to force https on all sites and filter out specific cookies, etc.

These methods on their own may not stop someone if they are already specifically trying to track you, however amongst the millions of people on the internet these methods make it pretty hard to identify you. Our greatest defence against tracking is numbers (especially when it comes to multiple people connecting through the same VPN). There are too many people on the internet to all be tracked individually and so it is usually easy to hide within the crowd by making yourself harder to track than the others. This makes it logistically inefficient to track you and gather any specific personal data as they could probably track 3 other people before they could find your IP through a proxy like Tor if they could find it at all. If nothing else you can inconvenience the companies that try to track you and increase the costs for the processing power required for their nosiness.

Personally I believe that anonymity on the web to a certain extent is a good thing. There are many who believe that anonymity can be used for illegal purposes and so a breach of personal privacy is justified. I find it odd that just because it's on the internet a breach of personal privacy is seen as rational and acceptable. We wouldn't want people watching over our shoulders constantly in real life as we read magazines, read our mail, or have a conversation with a friend. What makes people think that we would be ok with it just because we are on the internet?

Sources and related links:
https://abine.com/people_guide.php
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/168418-microsoft-google-working-on-super-cookies-to-track-your-behavior-everywhere
http://weknowmemes.com/tag/but-as-a-bundle-we-form-a-mighty-faggot/