I've come across a few news items recently re privacy issues, such as Phorm, and perhaps of more concern, the proposals suggested for government legislation to allow the monitoring of internet traffic. What can we as individuals do to protect our privacy?

Peter McCutcheon

Phorm involves rerouting traffic from the ISPs that adopt it. It appears that in the implementations of the system being considreed by UK ISPs, users will be able to opt out by setting a cookie within the PhormDiscover (formerly webwise.net ) domain to prevent redirection or by disabling cookies from webwise.net. There are also ways to nullify the attempt to use Phorm for advertising purposes, such as the Firephorm add-on for Firefox. However, some processing will be required to establish the opt-out. Ultimately, the best choice is to change your ISP to one that does not use Phorm or any similar service.

Another way to avoid Phorm - and to protect your privacy - is to access the internet via an encrypted proxy server. If your datastream is encrypted, it doesn't matter if your ISP uses DPI (deep packet inspection). A search for secure anonymous browsing will find plenty of services. It's about five years since I looked into this area, but the sites I tried at the time, such as Megaproxy and IDzap, are still going. I found Megaproxy's paid-for service worked best, but there's a good list of options at IP Info. However, bear in mind that, although your ISP won't be able to see what you are doing, the firm that decodes your datastream and accesses the net on your behalf can. It boils down to who you trust.

Anonymous internet services usually set up a "clientless VPN" (virtual private network) service that works through the web browser, so check if they also encrypt email. Lots of businesses now use VPNs for secure access across the net, including the Guardian, so encrypted traffic must be very common.

Anonymous surfing services often make you agree not to use them to do anything illegal, send spam etc. Some also prevent you from downloading files using automated downloaders.



• This corrected blog was restored on 5 April 2011 following the outcome of an investigation by the Readers' editor. In its original form, it said that Phorm involves rerouting all traffic from the ISPs that adopt it, whether users opt out or not. It has now been corrected.