How to browse the Web anonymously

Why should I want to be anonymous online?

There are various reasons why some people choose to stay anonymous online. One of the frequent reasons are privacy concerns. Some people tend to think, tracking your doings online by companies is sort of privacy violation and do not want to participate in this.

Online Privacy: A t-shirt by Electronic Frontier Foundation

Some Internet users choose to go anonymous because they want to open more than one account at community websites or social networks such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook or Twitter.

Internet is designed to track. Every address you visit and every TCP/IP packet you send and receive have their signatures and it's basically very easy to learn more about who you are, where are you from and even what operating system are you using and what is your screen resolution.

Some people do not want to share that information with others, thus they decide to go online anonymously.

What can I do to gain online anonymity?

If you want to be anonymous online, first measure you should take is to obfuscate your IP address, so that no one can read it. You should also remove any existing cookies and change your user agent name (user agent is a fancy description for your browser identification string that you send every time you visit a website. For example Mozilla Firefox's user agent looks like this: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.1).

Changing your IP address involves using a third-party service called proxy and user agent settings can be modified in your browser configuration (Learn how).

Proxy is used to actually change the IP address that is visible to your party while you visit a website. Proxy configuration is done via your browser network-connection settings. When using a proxy server to obfuscate your IP address, all data requests sent by you will go via the proxy and that proxy will route it to the destination address.

Proxies can be useful, but remember that you are exposing all information you are sending to the proxy operator. They can filter, record and review any piece of information you transmit via them. Malicious proxy operators can for example read your passwords or other confidential information, so remember to never use a proxy when banking or shopping online!

There are several types of proxies you can use to gain online anonymity:

• Open Proxies
  These are free proxies you can use at no cost. But remember, these are dangerous if you send any password or other confidential information via them.
• Private Proxies
  Private proxies usually operate on a paid-subscription basis and you need login and password to use these. This commercial type of a proxy is usually more reliable and more secure to use.
• Web Proxies
  Web proxies are usually scripts installed on a server that you can use to type your destination URL and the script will open it for you showing you the website contents. The good is that you don't have to configure your connection and you can start using web proxy in no time. The bad is that lots of websites will just not work with this type of proxy. For example https-enabled websites will almost always fail to open.