Private Internet Browsing

Private Internet Browsing. Anyone surfing the internet without filtering software and browser search options set to ‘strict’ or ‘moderate’ risk having the results returned that may contain objectionable material.

Children often stumble on such material when doing their homework. A minor spelling mistake in the search string or words that may infer another meaning are often linked to pornographic material. Stumbling across such material is very distressing for a youngster.

On the other hand, search engines for some time now have offered a feature allowing the user to surf the internet undetected.

Such features came about from a backlash by communities who were concerned about internet sites collecting personal information relating to the internet habits of their users. Some businesses collected this information and sold it to marketing companies for targeted advertising.

The feature, known as ‘Private Browsing’ (Mozilla Firefox) and ‘InPrivate’ (Internet Explorer) allows the user to surf the internet and not be detected. When using this feature, no activity is logged, therefore it is not possible to identify where a user has been, unless monitoring software has been installed, that does screen capturing.

InPrivate browsing can be turned on and off within Internet Explorer here.

Children using any of the private browsing features to surf the internet do so to hide the activity from their parents.

Another method of surfing the internet ‘privately’ is by using an ‘open proxy’ . There are thousands of sites in existence that provide for anonymous open proxy, which allow the user to conceal their network address and activity, and surf the internet without being tracked.

These sites have become useful in countries where the government has censored or blocked certain parts of the internet, as the technology allows for the user to bypass any filtering. It does however; it does provide another method for children to surf the internet undetected.

A list of the many thousands of anonymous proxies can be found here.

Turning off private browsing is done within the browser settings. Preventing someone from surfing the internet using an anonymous proxy can only be done using filtering software.