Trade Privacy for Ads with Hotspot Shield
May 29th, 2008 (8:00am) Mike Gunderloy 5 Comments
If you’re concerned about the sort of behavior tracking being carried out by companies like NebuAd and Phorm, then AnchorFree has a deal for you. Download and run their Hotspot Shield application (for either Windows or OS X), and you can surf anonymously. In return, though, AnchorFree will claim the top 90 pixels of your browser window to show you ads from their sponsors.
Hotspot Shield works by setting up a VPN between your computer and their servers in California. Encrypted traffic goes from you to California, making it impossible for anyone at your wireless hotspot or ISP to tell where you’re actually surfing; they just see a meaningless stream going to a single address. In turn, you appear as a visitor from California when you go to a site. I talked with AnchorFree, and they say that they do not collect or save any information on your activities or traffic. In cases where you’re extra concerned about preserving your privacy, this is a simple solution with a low price.
5 Comments Post your own comment
Alana Post says: May 29th, 2008 11:12am
What about Torbutton and Firefox? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2275
Janos says: May 29th, 2008 4:08pm
An additional solution to protect privacy against NebuAd, Phorm and “The Ever Watchful Eye of Google” is obfuscation. The idea is to generate fake queries and browsing activities. Two Firefox add-ons use this approach to protect privacy:
SquiggleSR (that I develop): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5986
TrackMeNot: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3173
James D Clarke says: May 30th, 2008 3:44am
I’ve been using Hotspot Shield for the last month or so whenever I’m on a public (unsecured) wifi network and it seems to work great.
The top bar/ads don’t load on every single page either, I’d say you see it on about 90% of pages, but it doesn’t affect my Google Apps For Your Domain GMail page, which is nice! Plus Ad Block Plus kills all the ads dead.
Anonymous says: May 30th, 2008 1:29pm
Great – use an ads-based piece of software to block ads. Makes sense. Duh.
Luis says: June 2nd, 2008 9:10am
I have been using the Hotspot Shield for a while and really like it. It is a totally free and I am always confident in keeping my private date to myself.