Here's a small sampling of the kind of information that a site can collect on you:

Your name is probably Terry Gambarottb, and you can be reached at terry@green.alexa.com. We can access your News postings and Web pages which talk about you. Furthermore, your browser also reveals 'crawler@alexa.com' as your return address.
Your Internet browser is ia_archiver.
You are coming from green.alexa.com.

Using your IP address (green.alexa.com) alone, a web site can track your movements through their pages and monitor your reading interests. It is widely agreed that governments and organizations publish dummy websites on controversial topics for the purpose of monitoring interested parties, for example. Also, this information, in combination with your e-mail address, can be used to increase the number of targeted advertisements fired at you by the marketers. Anonymizer Surfing hides your IP address -- the web site only sees that the Anonymizer fetched the page.

Using only your IP address (your machine's routing address) and your operating system type, a web site can automatically exploit security holes in your system using ready-made, free hacking programs. These programs can often just crash your machine, but in some cases can obtain access to the contents of your machine's memory space or your hard drive. Anonymizer Surfing prevents this by hiding your IP address so that no one can access your computer through the network.

In addition, a web site can insert a "cookie" into your browser. A cookie is a tracer which can contain any information the web site wants to give you -- names of the pages you typed, what you typed into the pages, etc. Then a web site can ask for all of this information, and can automatically compile a dossier of your interests while reading the site. Anonymizer stops cookies.

Java and Javascript are disabled because they can access sensitve information inside your web viewing program -- from some browsers, your e-mail address and the history of the pages you've read, for example. Also, Java code exists which can load into your browser under cover of some other application, and then report back to the originating site any information you submit through web forms from that point on.

Our Anonymizer Surfing service allows you to surf the web without revealing any personal information without your knowledge or permission. Click here to learn more.