Anonymous Web Browsing

Anonymous web browsing is browsing the World Wide Web while hiding the user's IP address and any other personally identifiable information from the websites that one is visiting.

A degree of anonymity can be achieved by using a proxy server or a VPN server. If the proxy server is trusted, anonymity will be retained because only the information on the proxy server is visible to outsiders. Anonymous web browsing is generally useful to internet users who want to ensure that their sessions can not be monitored. For instance, it is used to circumvent traffic monitoring by organizations which want to find out or control which web sites employees visit.

Anonymous Web Servers act as placing a wall between the user and the website which he/she is visiting. These servers can be used to bypass restrictions and visit those sites that might be blocked in a specific country, office or school. Some people only use these servers to protect their on line identity.

¹ Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_web_browsing on Apr. 16, 2010. Partially adapted. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License.