Being Anonymous For Safety

The Internet is a place in which it is imperative to remain anonymous at all times while working or just relaxing. When surfing online, you are side-by-side with many people you have never met before. Many of them are just there to do their business and leave, but some are there for other reasons. Where there is money, there are criminals. These criminals realize being online and doing theft is much easier and less risky than doing so in real-life and running the risk of being caught red-handed.

While this data should never be handed over willingly, this just recently happened. A cheerleader at a school in Mississippi was demanded to hand over her FaceBook information to her cheer-leading coach. The cheer-leading coach heard about this girl making a fuss about some internal politics of the team, and figured the information would have been conversed about on FaceBook. She was right; the girl surrendered her information and the coach found the conversation and alerted the rest of the school faculty. The girl was quickly reprimanded for her actions.

This seems wrong, and it is. The girl was forced to give up her personal information for her FaceBook account and then her account was hacked during school hours and on school property, then she was punished for her speech. This is unconstitutional, but unfortunately happens often on the Internet.

This was a willing transaction though. This girl had a choice in the matter, as most citizens do not. One does not choose to be hacked or intimidated into it. People feel very safe with their pre-installed firewalls and virus scanner programs, but these are not safe at all. Hackers know that most people just stick with these programs and therefore they know how to hack them quite well. They usually try and avoid anyone who has bolstered their security whatsoever. Why go after a hard target? That’s the life they chose; path of least resistance.

To protect yourself more fully, try exploring your privacy setting and turning off cookies and cache. A cookie is a little piece of data a website puts on your computer to track you and your activities on the site. A cache is actually a memory data base that holds a copy of all of the websites you visit that can actually help the site load a bit faster upon your next visit. Both of these are archaic technologies now that computers are so fast though, and just represent safety hazards.

To even further protect yourself, try using an anonymous proxy server. These will ensure anonymous browsing online by giving you a secure tunnel of access to go to all of your Internet sites through. These private proxies also come with an encryption service as well, which will encode all of your data so that any identity thief will be baffled by your hieroglyphic data. This is the best way to protect yourself, and you can bet hackers will steer clear of someone under the protection of a proxy server.

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