Not the most friendly of articles... but still pretty good. As usual, edited to stay within fair use. -Allen

Reuters New Media

_ Friday July 5 12:28 PM EDT _

Web Surfing Incognito

HOLLYWOOD - Ever felt like browsing without leaving those footprints that site designers, your school and your employer are increasingly inclined to harvest?

A service being offered at http://www.anonymizer.com purports to give Web surfers the freedom to travel at will without leaving tell-tale signs that they've been where they've been.

[...]

The visited site's layout and design can be altered, so you are probably not seeing it in all its glory -- and it is displayed within a field with hot buttons to take you back to the anonymizer site, a FAQ or to make a bug report (like, for example, you've reached a site which isn't preceded by the anonymizer URL).

Privacy is one of those issues veteran Netizens take very seriously -- it used to be called "anonymous" FTP after all. But many sites now depend on demographics passively collected, rather than just the number of hits, to attract advertisers.

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