said by M A R K :

Why cant he do what i do, i just put a proxy in fire-fox and im all good.

said by THX 1138 :

I hope I'm not diverting this thread, but I, too, worry *a little bit* about privacy. I haven't wanted to change my IP address, but it seems that advertisers know where I've been and are constantly targeting advertising at the sites I visit based on my IP address.

For example, if I visit a mortgage site, every big ad I see on well-managed sites after that seems to want to sell me a mortgage. I once had a Bose credit card, and it was sponsored by a bank that was also known for it's sub-prime loans. After that, all my other bank sites seemed to offer me only pictures of their happy customers who where from minorities. No majority faces anywhere. (This is neither good nor bad, but it does suggest some sort of profiling, if you will.)

I regularly clean out my cookies, but I feel that there is some tracking of IP addresses and my browsing habits that influences what I see on the web, and that's just a little disconcerting. I'd like to think I'm not paranoid, and I'm not ashamed of where I go on the web, but it just bugs me that there might be a marketing file assembled around my IP address. If that's true, then an anonymous IP address would be nice; kind of like a junk email address.

...or am I all wet about the technology?

said by freedom_rings :

I value my privacy and won't be giving it up anytime soon. Just because someone values privacy doesn't mean they have anything to hide. Not everybody wants to sell their soul to the devil, clearly some people just don't give a sh!t though.

said by ElJay :

Routing your internet traffic through an unknown proxy server would be like giving a random guy in the street that GPS tracker in your car, in my opinion.

said by freedom_rings :

Hey, how 'bout letting your car insurance company put a gps tracking unit in your vehicle too? You never speed or break any traffic rules, right?

said by THX 1138 :

Yes, thanks; that's what I suspected. My home DSL service has dynamic IP addressing, but my computer at work has a static IP address. I sometimes do banking and other online financial chores at work, and that's where I observe this IP address tracking.

said by THX 1138 :

Sometimes I feel like the banks, credit card companies, utilities, etc. are trying to figure out exactly who I am (marketing-wise),

said by THX 1138 :

and are assuming that they can tell who I am by the sites I visit.

said by THX 1138 :

Trouble is...they've got it wrong, as far as I can see. It's made me conscious of the privacy thing, even though I don't think there's anything I can do about it.

said by yesucan :

Yes you can. Just do a google search for somethin like hide ip. You'll find all kind of interesting stuff like wardriving, tunneling, Tor(not a proxy imo), vpn's etc... Don't listen to people who love to censor things.

said by nixen :

However, if your work is like many work locations, your desktop IP isn't the IP that the website sees. Chances are, your work either uses internal proxies or does NATing at the firewall. So, the IP address remote sites see is either that of the proxy or the NAT.

said by jvmorris :

Yes, well . . . and then there was the rather well-known Federal Government organization that I once worked for. I was rather astonished to find that my workstation IP was a public IP address and (based on a bit of subsequent investigation) not only visible from the 'net, but fully accessible! What makes it even worse was that this was supposed to be a high-tech Fed organization -- well, that and the fact that my workstation was in their Software Development Center. I decided then and there that, like my hometown, this was a good place to be from -- and immediately.

said by webfootguy :

Try using a VPN service like www.relakks.com. For a few $$ a month, you get an IP address that is not easily tracable to you (useful for P2P activities). You still need to be running a firewall but a least all your traffic is encrypted and not associated with your ISP (Which will give you up if requested by law officers). Our laws do not apply to other countries so you are safe from "investigation".

said by nixen :

. . . Ugh. Don't talk to me about Federal offices. Every time I have to work at a Federal site, I see stuff that makes me shake my head. Most of the .mil sites seem to be decently and fairly consistently cordoned-off (sometimes the word "byzantine" comes to mind).

said by webfootguy :

You still need to be running a firewall but a least all your traffic is encrypted and not associated with your ISP (Which will give you up if requested by law officers). Our laws do not apply to other countries so you are safe from "investigation".

said by webfootguy :

The RIAA goes after the slowest/most obvious person (as well as hacker/criminal elements). It is a question of exposure to risks. My humble opinion.