SillyDog701

[James]

I received an announcement from Zone Alarm today that I could purchase their new program called Anonymizer. Evidently it will "protect me and my family from online identity theft by keeping me IP address (and my identity) private." It does this by redirecting Web traffic through their secure servers thereby hiding my IP address so online snoops are unable to track the sites I visit and build profiles on my Internet activities.

So... at $19.95 is it a good deal? Would my surfing by slowed down by this extra diversion through their servers? I'm certainly willing to take the chance but evidently they do not provide a free trial so I'm curious as to whether anyone here has any experience with this sort of product. Thanks.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4

[DJGM]

Methinks the people at Anonymizer.com might have something to say about this!

UserAgent: Opera/9.00 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)

[Don_HH2K]

Tor is free and does exactly the same thing. I've never used it before, but I did read about it a few months back in an issue of PC World. If I'm not mistaken, it was rated pretty well. I'll see if I can scrounge up the article and link it here.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060516 Donzilla/1.1 (WML/1.3)

[James]

Thanks for the responses. I'm assuming that since there was no addressing of the issue of how such a program affects surfing that no one has actually tried this sort of program. It would seem logical that it would have a negative affect and I'm wondering if the extra layer of security would be worth that aggravation. Thanks.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4