A service allows surfers to visit websites without revealing information about themselves or their computers. Nearly all websites collect information of some kind about visitors, in particular their ip addresses, which web servers need to send pages back to the right place. Many sites also use cookies to track visitors and link e-mail addresses to particular ip ad- dresses, allowing marketers to identify users and add them to mailing lists.
By subscribing to a web-based anonymity service, users can hide their ip addresses and prevent websites from in- stalling cookies on their machine, thus providing them with a greater degree of privacy. Many anonymisers also prevent well- known annoyances such as pop-up windows. Anonymisers rely on proxy servers to act as intermediaries between users and the websites they are trying to visit.
Instead of sending information directly to the site, the anonymising service redirects all requests for web pages to its own proxy servers, from where the request is subsequently dispatched. As a result, website owners see only the ip address of the service, rather than the user, and can theoretically gather no information about the person or computer actually looking at the site.
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