Privacy protection and anonymity services for the World Wide Web (WWW)

Although browsing on the World Wide Web (WWW) feels like an anonymous activity, it is hardly that way. Website administrators generally get a lot of information about users and their browsing behavior, enabling such things as one-to-one marketing. Even more information is available to Internet service providers whose HTTP proxy servers may keep track of every Website visited by their subscribers. Similarly, it is difficult to publish data on the Web without revealing the corresponding HTTP server name or IP address. In this situation, privacy protection and anonymity services for the WWW are becoming increasingly important fields of study. This paper overviews and briefly discusses some technologies that are available today and that can be used to provide support for anonymous browsing and anonymous publishing on the WWW. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.