Surfing the Internet today may be compared to walking on a minefield. You can walk all day on the field and feel lucky for not stepping on a mine but, inevitably, if you stroll through that field long enough, you are bound to step on one. The Internet today is filled with virii, Trojans, and spyware. Every website you visit, every click on a link, is a potential threat. Therefore, users protect themselves by loading their computers with firewalls and antivirus programs to combat malicious content. Firewalls filter all the traffic coming into your computer. Antivirus programs then check the data that goes through the filter and scans them again. But is this enough? What about the information that you send out to the Internet? What tool filters that information?
Identity theft is one of the biggest problems that are a by-product of the popularity of the Internet today. Every sensitive piece of information about an individual can be collected through the Internet by anyone who looks hard enough. From credit card information to Social Security Numbers, these data can fall into the wrong hands and cause unrestrained damage to an individual. Monetary loss is just the beginning. Identity theft can damage the credit score rating of a person and have an impact on every aspect of a person’s life. From taking out loans, applying for a job, or even renting an apartment, damage to your credit score affects the outcomes of these. Victims of identity theft then discover that a damaged credit score rating can take years to fix. So how can you avoid the same fate? Anonymous surfing may be the answer.
Hence, it is important to protect your personal information; and nothing does the job better than Anonymous surfing. Anonymous surfing works by indirectly connecting individuals to their desired web pages. Instead of you visiting a website directly, broadcasting your information out into the Internet, you first connect to an intermediary, usually a proxy server, which then connects you to your desired websites. Web proxies, however are limited. The information you transmit to the web proxy is not data encrypted and, if the security of the proxy server is compromised, your information is also compromised.
A much more reliable method for Anonymous surfing would be downloading software that connects you to a VPN or Virtual Private Network. One example would be Yousab found on www.vpnmessenger.com. It acts just like any other Instant Messenger like Yahoo Messenger and MSN, but with a twist. In addition to the VoIP capability and the sending of messages and files to other users, Yousab also operates silently in the background, allowing for anonymity when surfing the Internet.
As a bonus to protecting your information, surfing anonymously also has a nice side effect of bypassing website restrictions. If, for example, a company blocks the website Facebook from being accessed in their network, web proxies and VPNs may act as a Facebook unblock tool, allowing access to blocked sites. This is possible because it is not you who connects to the blocked site, but the web proxy or VPN.
