but if you are really worried about privacy you could surf the net using a proxy server.
I disagree with this. If you are just browsing a couple of pages, posting political messages, etc. sure... use a proxy...

Take this scenario...

You want to remain anonymous on the net. You lookup a list of proxies and pick one with decent speed. You don't know who is running that proxy nor do you know what else is running on it. I can setup a proxy and then run a sniffer and capture all your banking tranactions, emails, passwords to various services, what you just purchased on ebay, etc.

Another reason I wouldn't trust them is... you want to remain anonymous... but are you in fact doing that? or giving ONE person(s) the ability to track everything you do?

Read This and then tell me if I'm wrong. Popular Net anonymity service back-doored

Wonder how many others have also been backdoored...

And you were worried that Polo might find out that you were also considering purchasing a Gap t-shrit...

Proxies were not necessarily meant to be used as a way to become anonymous....

They were meant as a way to filter out web pages, provide one means of connection to the internet and cache pages...

It just so happens that you can use them for more than one purpose.

proxy server Last modified: Monday, August 05, 2002

A server that sits between a client application, such as a Web browser, and a real server. It intercepts all requests to the real server to see if it can fulfill the requests itself. If not, it forwards the request to the real server.
Proxy servers have two main purposes:

Improve Performance: Proxy servers can dramatically improve performance for groups of users. This is because it saves the results of all requests for a certain amount of time. Consider the case where both user X and user Y access the World Wide Web through a proxy server. First user X requests a certain Web page, which we'll call Page 1. Sometime later, user Y requests the same page. Instead of forwarding the request to the Web server where Page 1 resides, which can be a time-consuming operation, the proxy server simply returns the Page 1 that it already fetched for user X. Since the proxy server is often on the same network as the user, this is a much faster operation. Real proxy servers support hundreds or thousands of users. The major online services such as Compuserve and America Online, for example, employ an array of proxy servers.
Filter Requests: Proxy servers can also be used to filter requests. For example, a company might use a proxy server to prevent its employees from accessing a specific set of Web sites.
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