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Going undercover online
Surfing is not
anonymous!
Every time you visit a
website, you transmit a number of details about yourself.
These include
innocuous things like the size & resolution of your monitor,
but also potentially compromising details such as:
| Your
computer's operating system (e.g. Windows XP) - this
could enable a malicious website to target you with
privacy invading programs like spyware or viruses. |
| Your
computer's regional & language settings -
enabling websites to identify your nationality.
Dangerous if you are pretending to be French speaker
from a different time zone! |
| Your
connection's "host name". This sometimes
incorporates the user name you picked when you joined
your ISP. It could potentially allow the website you
visited to guess your email address, home page address,
name etc. |
| Your IP
address. Like the "host name" this helps
the Internet direct web pages to you, but it also
identifies your ISP. This is dangerous if your ISP
happens to be a famous newspaper, but even if you are
surfing from home this can be risky. IP addresses
are sometimes "static" (i.e. unique to your
connection) and can appear next to messages you leave in
online communities. Remember, any text - names, email
addresses, phone numbers and IP addresses - can be
entered into a search engine (example) |
| The
referring page. If you reached a website by clicking
on a link, the address of the previous page is revealed.
If you found their site by doing a search, the words you
entered may be revealed. A low key racist group might be
suspicious if reached their site by searching for nazis
crime and luton. They would be highly
suspicious if you found them by clicking a link on an
anti-racist website. Not the best way to start
infiltrating a group! |
These details are
recorded in log files and analysed by special programs. It is possible
for a website owner to trace a visitors every move, see which
pages they repeatedly visited, which words they searched for and
how often they've visited.
Websites can store
special codes called tracking cookies on visitors machine which
allow tracking across numerous syndicated websites.
If they wanted to
website owners could rig up alarm bells to ring every time a
journalist or police officer visited their sites!
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