Maintaining Your Privacy
By Eric Spellmann
Are you a private person? Do you cringe at the thought
of someone
watching your every move? Or reading your private messages?
Well,
listen up! The Internet has some great resources to help you maintain
your anonymity, at least in the online world.
Web Surfing
Every time you visit a website, you leave a footprint. These tracks
contain a very important piece of information called an "IP Address."
An IP Address is the unique ID every computer on the Internet MUST have
in order to communicate. "IP" is short for 'Internet Protocol.' The
address is a series of four three-digit numbers, such as
'134.056.002.253' Your ISP has large blocks of these IP numbers assigned
to them by THEIR provider.
If someone wanted to know who visited a certain website, they could
track that IP address back to it's owner, your ISP. Then, if your
ISP
cooperates, they could link that IP to YOU based on the date and time
you were assigned that ID. Typically, only law enforcement officials
go
through such painstaking steps to find a user. However, that remote
possibility is enough to cause some privacy-minded citizens to seek
better protection. Enter, Anonymizer.
Anonymizer
Think of Anonymizer (http://www.anonymizer.com)
as a proxy web-surfer.
Take a look at the top-right of their home page. Simply type any
web
address into the blank to surf anonymously. Here's how it works:
Let's
say you didn't want the IRS to know that you visited their "Will I get
Audited?" web page. First, go to Anonymizer's website and type the
IRS's address (http://www.irs.gov) into the blank.
The IRS homepage will slowly appear. The sudden drop in speed is
due to
two factors: First, you have now introduced a middleman (Anonymizer)
into your surfing. All web pages will now be routed through Anonymizer
first before they reach your computer. Second, Anonymizer's
paying
customers get priority on the service over free users. But, the
free
service is decent for occasional usage. It's easy to know when you're
using Anonymizer and when you are surfing "naked." The Anonymizer
address bar will appear at the top of your screen along with "Protected
by Anonymizer" appearing in the title of every document you view.
Anonymous Re-mailers
But what if you need to send an anonymous e-mail message? And, "yes,"
before you ask, legitimate reasons do exist for this service. The
Global Internet Liberty Campaign explains it this way:
"Anonymity is essential to protect free speech. It can be used to
protect human rights workers reporting abuses, political dissidents
commenting on government actions, writers publishing controversial
literature and other important functions where revealing a person's
identity would threaten a person's life or wellbeing. Anonymous
publishing has been recognized in the United States as being protected
by the First Amendment."
Most of these services forward your message through numerous servers
around the world, stripping off the previous server's address. The
recipient has no way of knowing that the message came from you.
Of
course, because of this "stripping" action, they also have no way to
reply to you. For more information on re-mailing, check out the
GILC's
comprehensive collection of links at
http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/.
Cleaning Your Hard Drive
Most of you know that simply throwing a file into the recycle bin does
not make it irretrievable. After all, you can always double-click
on
the trash and pull it back out. However, what if you "empty the
recycle
bin?" Could someone still retrieve the file? Yes, unless special
steps
are taken.
When your computer deletes a file, it doesn't truly erase it. It
simply
marks the area on the hard drive where the file exists as "available."
The next time you save a file, it may (or may not) over-write that
deleted file. That's how "undelete" programs work. They try
to piece
together file fragments that have not been overwritten by new data.
However, even if that area on the hard drive has been overwritten eight
times, the data still leaves a "magnetic signature." Law enforcement
officials have devices that can decipher these "data ghosts" and rebuild
the deleted files.
To truly erase all data, you need a special program. I recommend,
UltraWipe (http://www.webattack.com/get/ultrawipe.shtml).
It's a free
program that will find the empty areas of your hard drive, write random
data over them, then erase it, then repeat the process over and over and
over. It claims to meet "Department of Defense standards" for file
deletion. Be careful, though. It has a "Panic Button" that
will
immediately erase a user-selected group of folders with a mouse-click.
Some people believe that the government and corporations are slowly
eroding our right to privacy. However, with the tools I've mentioned,
you'll have a fighting chance against these "Big Brothers."
I'll see you in Cyberspace!
Eric Spellmann is the owner of Spellmann & Associates, a corporate
technology training facility in Amarillo, Texas. Besides his weekly
column, he produces technology segments for his local CBS television
affiliate and speaks at numerous conferences. If you would like
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