There have been a lot of articles lately talking about the fact that the person who hacked in to Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! account used “an anonymizer”. The articles also say that the privacy provided was compromised.

The unfortunate misuse of Anonymizer’s registered trademark has created some confusion. The person who hacked the account used a privacy service, but not one connected in any way to Anonymizer Inc.

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It has been a while since the last major change to the product suite at Anonymizer. We have been thinking long and hard about how best to continue to improve the services we offer. Anyone who has been an Anonymizer customer or has ever read my blog knows of my staunch commitment to listening to our users and providing the highest quality offerings available.

Some of our products provide important capabilities, but are not unique or distinctive to Anonymizer. Lately our development team has been spread thin updating and improving a wide range of software services. I want to make sure we are focusing on our core Anonymizer tools and making them the best they can be. As part of this continuing effort, I wanted to let you know that we’ve decided to discontinue offering our Dial-Up, Digital Shredder Lite and Anti-Spyware features, effective September 15, 2008. Doing so will ensure that we can remain focused on our Anonymous Surfing, Total Net Shield, and Nyms services.

You can find the official word on this at our Anonymizer Support Center 
https://www.anonymizer.com/support_center/. Subscribers can also call our dedicated customer support team at 888-270-0141 between the hours of 7:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. PST Monday-Friday.

Please leave your suggestions for how we can improve our core products either here, or better yet as feedback to our customer support center. The Internet makes for a rapidly changing landscape. Only with your suggestions can we continue to shape Anonymizer to meet your needs.

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Both Microsoft’s new beta of IE 8 and Google’s beta of their new browser Chrome tout new enhanced privacy features. I have seen a few articles like this one, that talk about this issue. The Safari browser has had these features in the production version for a long time.

Privacy is a complex multi-headed beast. All of these browsers address one privacy concern while ignoring others. These browsers protect you from risks associated with the stored local data about your web browsing activities. Normally, browsers keep a history of recently visited URLs, a cache of recently visited pages (for faster retrieval) and cookies from the websites you have visited (possibly not at all recently). These browsers enable you to take control of what is recorded by your browser, and how long it is kept. This is a good and important development.

These new security capabilities do nothing to protect you from information gathering by the sites you visit, or from your ISP (see my previous post on that). Your IP address is still completely visible to any site you visit, ISPs can still intercept all your traffic.

These new privacy features are an important part of a user’s toolbox, but they should not give one a false sense of security. They are part of the solution, but not a complete solution.

browser · privacy tool