Anonymous browsing.

[James Random]

We live in a world where multitudes of companies want to know every facet
of your life so that they can use this to sell you some shit via AdSense, or popups.

If you're fed up with, or worried about, being tracked on the Internet then read on:

First of all, you should be using Google Chrome. This is simply because, with the various
plugins that are available for it, it is more secure than firefox, safari, IE or Opera, etc.

Handy plugins for Google Chrome are

Adblock Plus
Do Not Track plus
and History Eraser.

Adblock does what it says on the tin. Blocks Ads/Popups.

Do Not Track blocks pretty much every sort of tracker there
is, including the facebook 'like' buttons tracking and Google Analytics.

History Eraser can erase every item of history since you first booted up
your computer regardless of what browser (s) you used to use and makes
several 'passes' to ensure the information is truly gone.

These three plugins provide a good blanket coverage of security for you
if you're general browsing.

You can add other things, like M86 Security, which displays little icons
next to links in google searches to show you which sites are safe
and which ones are not.


As a general FYI, Do Not Track is currently blocking 10 trackers on AO. :)

[Blu-ray]

Adblock and Do not track are both available for Safari for Mac.

[Anarch]

duckduckgo.com is open source web searching that does not cache your searches.

[James Random]

duckduckgo.com is open source web searching that does not cache your searches.


I think Do Not Track Plus does this as well.

[lycanox]

Best way is the old wisdom. Don't do stuff you don't want people to know about.
People may complain about the tracking companies a lot. But most people grow victim to their own stupidity.
And blurt out their stuff on sites like facebook.

[Blu-ray]

Best way is the old wisdom. Don't do stuff you don't want people to know about.
People may complain about the tracking companies a lot. But most people grow victim to their own stupidity.
And blurt out their stuff on sites like facebook.

I don't think it's all about going to sites that you don't want people to know about. I use them because I don't like the whole tracking aspect of it. It's just plain creepy! It's like these companies are cyber stalkers.

[James Random]

Best way is the old wisdom. Don't do stuff you don't want people to know about.
People may complain about the tracking companies a lot. But most people grow victim to their own stupidity.
And blurt out their stuff on sites like facebook.

It's not so much that for me. It's more about the fact that I am not a commodity. I do not want my
preferences sold and traded between private firms unless I'm seeing some of the money.

But as you're practically in love with Big Brother you would subscribe to the 'If you have nothing to hide
you have nothing to worry about'. Hell, I bet you'd install the BBCCTV in your house yourself!

[James Random]

List of trackers on AO forums:

Google Adsense
ValueClick
SiteMeter
Tynt Tracer
Google Analytics
StatCounter

On the main page:

All of the above, plus:
ValueClick Media
Quantcast
Facebook.com

[lazserus]

While these addons help clean up your browsing history and/or prevent certain advertisements from showing, not a one equates to "anonymous" browsing. More or less, these are half-ass ways to clean your history, a task every browser can perform. I will say that AdBlock is a great plugin for Google Chrome and everyone should install it. It doesn't just block advertising banners, it more or less acts as a malicious code blocker, preventing evil scripts from launching and blocking the primary gateway of malware propagation. Good stuff.

The other things aren't bad, it's just that they don't actually ensure surfing privacy. Most of it cleans up after the mess as opposed to preventing the mess. If you want to surf the net anonymously, you're gonna have to go through at least one proxy server. To do the ninja stuff like the hackers/crackers of Anonymous (as in ghosting), you need to jump through several proxies. Unless you build your own proxy server, there's no guarantee any site or other service will mask your IP and MAC. No script will provide anonymity.