A survey on solutions and main free tools for privacy enhancing Web communications

Abstract

Concern for privacy when users are surfing on the Web has increased recently. Nowadays, many users are aware that when they are accessing Web sites, these Web sites can track them and create profiles on the elements they access, the advertisements they see, the different links they visit, from which Web sites they come from and to which sites they exit, and so on. In order to maintain user privacy, several techniques, methods and solutions have appeared. In this paper we present an analysis of both these solutions and the main tools that are freely distributed or can be used freely and that implement some of these techniques and methods to preserve privacy when users and surfing on the Internet. This work, unlike previous reviews, shows in a comprehensive way, all the different risks when a user navigates on the Web, the different solutions proposed that finally have being implemented and being used to achieve Web privacy goal. Thus, users can decide which tools to use when they want navigate privately and what kind of risks they are assuming.

Internet Censorship detection: A survey

“…Even if not specifically designed for censorship circumvention, anonymity technologies can and have been used to circumvent censorship: a recent survey on usage of several technologies including proxy servers, remailers, overlay networks such as JAP (Köpsell et al [92]), I2P (Schomburg [135]), and Tor (Dingledine et al [46]) is provided by Li et al [102]. 4 Specifically dealing with web browsing activities, a survey on "privacy enhancing" tools is presented by Ruiz-Martínez [133]. A comprehensive source for academic literature on anonymity is the structured bibliography page of the Free Haven project [59].…”

Inhibiting Browser Fingerprinting and Tracking

“…Tor not only can hide the user's location but also can protect the entire information being transferred using encryption [17,18]. Tor sends user information through a number of Tor servers located around the world, provided by a voluntary basis (to provide a public service).…”

Burning money with firewalls

“…Initially interest in this field was primarily theoretical but in the last 30 years a lot of research in this field has looked at developing practical and usable systems for preserving anonymity [10,11]. Such systems include Mixmaster [12], Mixminion [13], TOR [14], I2P [15] and many others which are actively under development.…”