You never know who’s watching what you’re doing online. Especially if you’re connecting to public networks, you may be exposing yourself to online criminals, and putting yourself at risk for identity theft. Did you know there are even Firefox applications that allow other users to monitor what you’re doing online and steal your usernames and passwords (Look up Firesheep). So how can you protect yourself?

When you use a proxy or a VPN to change your IP address, you can do what’s called “anonymous surfing”. This means you use an IP address from a different network. IT doesn’t belong to anyone – its just from a network of server’s who’s job is to assign IP addresses. That way, any monitoring of the IP address (not that its actually possible for these kinds of IPs) leads back to the server, and not to you. A good choice of location would be a US IP. When you get a US IP address in The UK to hide your British IP, you’ll also get access to American sites that are usually unavailable to users in The UK, with a British IP.

The topic of anonymous surfing online doesn’t come up in normal conversation, but there are a lot of users that are discovering this method of surfing on the internet. Finding out about anonymous surfing online usually comes from some sort of need. For example, I first found out about it because I moved to China and it became necessary for me to access my Facebook account. However, after doing some research into it, I found that there are many other uses, including unblocking websites and hiding your IP on public networks where you data can get jacked. Now I frequently surf anonymously despite not living in China anymore.