Foil trackers and exert control
with The Proxomitron
(No longer being upgraded. Final edition, June, 2003)

Would you like strangers to have a list of the sites you've visited online? No?

How about giving them a list of all the sites your family members have visited? No again?

Many agencies try to track you as you move about the Internet. Or, more precisely, they track your browser. They use images or other files called from offsite, sophisticated data bases, and digital cookies to get this done.

The first time you land on a site affiliated with one of these groups, your presence is recorded and your browser is presented with a cookie — maybe from the site you surfed to, definitely from the tracking agency’s independent server (which is quietly and invisibly serving up offsite content to you). Later, when you land on any other site served by that same agency, the agency's cookie is read and your presence is again recorded. Eventually, the tracking agency has an extensive list of your surfing habits, at least among the sites with which the agency is affiliated. And it uses that list, supposedly, to “personalize” ads for you — ads it thinks will have you happily buying on impulse. (What else such agencies may use your browsing history for, or who else they may give your history to, is anybody’s guess.)

Now, 'net cookies are generally good things. They help site owners and you in numerous ways; some even reward repeat visitors to a commercial site with secret discounts.

You probably don’t want to block cookies completely.

But, if you belong to one of the millions of families who don’t set up individual user indentities on their browsers, information quickly becomes blurred when cookies deliver information from one site to another. Mom gets bombarded with music-download ads as she goes online to look for books; Dad gets a string of unrequested popups about the latest TV shows as he goes online to check out options for upgrading his Internet connection. Does this result in impulse buying? Maybe. Mom may impulsively buy a jazz or classical CD, hoping her kids might learn to like “music that takes talent”; Dad may impulsively ask Mom to buy him a book or two.

You probably do want to block cookies that come from commercial-tracking sites.

The fact is that ad companies could easily target web sites instead of web visitors. So we think the current system is wrong-headed and a needless, if small, invasion of privacy. And we're grateful to Scott R. Lemmon, inventer of The Proxomitron, a small software proxy server that gives you control over what web sites can do.

Besides blocking ad-servers, The Proxomitron can kill pop-up windows, block banner ads from appearing, stop sites from gathering information about your browser and operating system, deny sites knowledge of where you've been on the Web, and even squash offsite images such as "web bugs,” tiny transparent images that some sites use to collect information about visits.

Best of all, you can enable or disable the individual Proxomitron filters or the entire thing with just a click of your mouse. This is a great feature, not least because web bugs and cookies are usually benign and useful, so why give up their benefits unless you have a need to surf completely stealthed? (When we visit sleazy sites — and we web designers do, because that's where some of the most original and clever, and aggravating, scripting can be found — we always configure The Proxomitron to block images and objects called from other sites, as well as to block intrusive scripts that gather more than just IP number, browser version, and system version. But on all other sites, we welcome web bugs and cookies; they're helpful: they're the traffic counters and headwaiters of the Internet.)

If you have trouble configuring your browser to use The Proxomitron, use these images of what your Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Opera browser control panel should look like when configured properly for the Proxomitron.

Download it, try it out. BUT PLEASE USE IT IN CONJUNCTION WITH YOUR FIREWALL AND, AS PART OF SAFE PRACTICE, DO NOT GIVE IT PERMISSION TO ACT AS A SERVER. A “proxy server” is not intended to act as an outgoing server. It is there to serve public documents to you, not your documents to the public. THE PROXOMITRON DOES NOT NEED TO BE GIVEN SERVER PERMISSION TO WORK. (Remember, every time you give something on your system permission to act as a server, you are opening a path into your computer from the Internet.)

Oh, and remember, when you're at a site you like and it asks you to click through to a sponsor's site? Bypass The Proxomitron before you make the click. You want that good site you like to get credit for referring you, don't you? (But don't forget to turn The Proxomitron back on when you're done.)