I received a request from a regular reader of Super Fast Computer to write an article about online privacy. Perhaps I shouldn’t mention his name!

There are many ways that you can be tracked and/ or identified when you are online. The good news is, unless you are a terrorist or a pedophile, there is not a lot to worry about. The number one thing working in favor of online privacy is the fact that there are so many millions of people online: anonymity through obscurity.

A lot of people don’t realize that every computer on the internet has a unique identification number, known as an IP address. This works exactly the same as your home address, which allows the postal worker to deliver the mail that you are meant to receive. To find out what your IP address is, check this site.

Dial-up users are assigned a new IP address each time they connect to the Internet. High-speed users generally have the same address for months at a time. This makes them vulnerable to attempts to infiltrate their computer. If someone wants to break into your computer, the first thing they need is your IP address. That is everyone, and especially people with high-speed internet, should consider installing a good firewall.

Every time you visit a web site, your IP address is recorded in the webmaster’s visitor log. Click the following button to see the visitor log of this site:

Likewise, every time you send an email, your IP address is sent in the header information of that email. This information is not usually displayed by default; consult the help index of your email program to learn how to view headers.

After you know someone’s IP address, you can find out (within a certain degree of accuracy) where they are. This link will reveal the location of a given IP address. Try putting in your own IP address to test it.

If you want to surf anonymously, there are many tools available, such as this one.

If you need to send email anonymously, or post to a newsgroup or mailing list, you should start by setting up a proxy, such as the one above. Then you need to find a good remailer: Check this list to find a reliable one. Actually, one can “daisy-chain” an email through several remailers, which makes your email almost impossible to retrace.

With the above method, the message is still unencrypted, so the super-paranoid will want to download and become familiar with PGP encryption.

If you are lazy like me, you might just settle for a disposable email address. Make sure that you use one that doesn’t make you register using your real contact information, and realize that your IP address is still sent with the email.

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of privacy. For more information visit The EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center).