NerdWorld, November 12, 2002

SaferSurf.com ends Espionage on the Internet

Scandalous: Internet visitors are spied out by web bugs without their knowledge. To prevent that, the SaferSurf protection against viruses and spam now also offers anonymous surfing. 'Eavesdroppers' only get meaningless user profiles and cannot spy out internet surfers any more.

SaferSurf not only protects automatically against viruses, dangerous dialers and spam mail before infected files can reach the user computer. As of today SaferSurf also acts as anonymous proxy. The IP address of the user and any information about him, like for example his location or his provider, cannot be seen by anyone else. Whenever a web page is loaded, SaferSurf deletes the referrer information and the web bugs from the data stream.

Web bugs are small invisible images (normally the size of 1x1 pixels and transparent) that are usually placed at the side or the end of HTML documents. Such a HTML tag could look like this:
<img src="http://www.bigbadcompany.com/cgi-bin/screw-your-privacy.cgi">. What makes it conspicious is that the image source is not an ordinary GIF or JPEG file, but that it calls a CGI script that then returns the picture.

Web bugs are used to create user profiles. User profiles are generated world-wide. Not only global companies like Yahoo and GeoCities and the worlds biggest banner network Doubleclick pay no heed to privacy. Now even small companies like Geobytes or Geolizer try to make money out of user data.

Here is an extract from the Geolizer website: "We break the IP addresses of website visitors down according to town, zip code, state, provider, longitude and latitude or search engine. All this with an exactness within the range of 50 km."

"If now even run-of-the-mill providers like Geolizer are starting to spy out users and to sell their location, access provider and last visited web page to the highest bidder, something must be done. These services are destroying the confidence of internet users in a secure and anonymous net", says René Holzer, CEO of Nutzwerk and inventor of the real-time data filter SaferSurf.

In order to generate an accurate user profile, a so-called web bug is used to find out the last page visited. This information is contained in the referrer. In order to save all the referrer information at one central point, a small image is placed on the pages, a so-called web bug. As the user is allocated a unique number (the IP address) while surfing, these two pieces of information give quite a clear picture of what sites he visited on the internet.

"It's scandalous that visitors are spied out by web bugs without their knowledge. It is with great interest that I see that the web bugs of leading computer magazines that normally stand up for privacy in their publications, have the highest ranking in the statistics. Aparrently the association of advertising media is so powerful that it can force everybody to use the 'spy tool' web bug. But that's over now once and for all", says Holzer about his impressions when reading the current web bug statistics.

If desired, SaferSurf deletes the referrer information from the data stream whenever the user jumps to a new site. This way neither the visited site nor any 'eavesdroppers' will know where the user came from. In addition the user is surfing with the IP number of the SaferSurf server. He is virtually anonymous.

With SaferSurf the following happens: If the owner of the web bug now registers all activities and evaluates the referrer information, the information makes no sense any more. Thanks to the SaferSurf server it is impossible to find out how the individual visitors and internet addresses are related. The 'eavesdropper' gets the impression that a single user is surfing the internet with thousands of browsers. In the end he gets a totally unstructured, worthless user profile.

"Of course I can understand the interest of websites and the advertising industry in user profile data, as long as it enables them to advertise accurately and without stray loss. But to create and evaluate hidden user profiles in order to sell them - that is going too far", continues Holzer.

Apart from deleting the referrer information and generating meaningless user profiles, SaferSurf also has a list of known 'eavesdroppers'. As soon as a web bug is placed by them, SaferSurf blocks the web bug. Due to the interplay of several protective features the user privacy is protected on the internet.

More information about web bugs:
http://www.safersurf.com/english/extern/ext_webbug.html