Anonymizer, Inc. is an

Internet privacy Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storing, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via Internet. Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. Pr ...

company, founded in 1995 by Lance Cottrell, author of the

Mixmaster anonymous remailer Mixmaster is a Type II anonymous remailer which sends messages in fixed-size packets and reorders them, preventing anyone watching the messages go in and out of remailers from tracing them. It is an implementation of a Chaumian Mix network. Hist ...

. Anonymizer was originally named Infonex Internet. The name was changed to Anonymizer in 1997 when the company acquired a web based privacy proxy of the same name developed by Justin Boyan at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

School of Computer Science. Boyan licensed the software to

C2Net C2Net was an Internet cryptography company founded by Sameer Parekh, which was sold to Red Hat in 2000. It was best known for its Stronghold secure webserver software. Community ConneXion C2Net started out as Community ConneXion in 1994, an Inte ...

for public beta testing before selling it to Infonex. One of the first web privacy companies founded, Anonymizer creates a VPN link between its servers and its users computer, creating a random IP address, rather than the one actually being used. This can be used to anonymously report a crime, avoid spam, avoid

Internet censorship Internet censorship is the legal control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. Censorship is most often applied to specific internet domains (such as Wikipedia.org) but exceptionally may extend to all Inte ...

, keep the users identity safe and track competitors, among other uses.

History

The

USA PATRIOT Act The USA PATRIOT Act (commonly known as the Patriot Act) was a landmark Act of Congress, Act of the United States Congress, signed into law by President of the United States, President George W. Bush. The formal name of the statute is the Uniti ...

, which was signed in October 2001 in response to the September 11 attacks, brought more attention to anonymization tools. Lance Cottrell was quoted saying that Anonymizer keeps no record of activity or users, which protects both the company and its users from FBI subpoenas. Anonymizer was featured as one of the "50 Most Incredibly Useful Sites" in the July 2002 issue of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine. The StealthSurfer II of 2005 came with Anonymizer, using a 128-bit SSL technology to mask IP addresses and create an encrypted channel. In 2005, Anonymizer maintained a product line including Anonymous Surfing (AS), to keep users IP addresses anonymous; Anti-Spyware, this found and removed spyware from its user's computer; Digital Shredder, which removed cookies, temporary files, and emptied cache; and Total Privacy Suite, which featured all three aforementioned products. Anonymizer's "Operation: Anti-Censorship" software, introduced in 2006, addresses

internet censorship in the People's Republic of China Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China (PRC) affects both publishing and viewing online material. Many controversial events are censored from news coverage, preventing many Chinese citizens from knowing about the actions of th ...

by allowing Chinese Internet users to access blocked sites.

Ownership

Abraxas Corporation acquired Anonymizer in May 2008. In 2010, Cubic purchased Abraxas for $124 million in cash. Ntrepid acquired Anonymizer in late 2010; it is a wholly owned subsidiary of

Ntrepid Ntrepid is an American software, computer hardware, hardware, and computer security, cyber security company, registered in Florida and based in Herndon, Virginia, Herndon, Virginia.Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain"Revealed: US spy operation that manipu ...

Products

Anonymizer offers a variety of consumer information security services including

VPN A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. The be ...

for multi-protocol proxy, client software for iPhone and

iPad The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operating s ...

, an anonymizer

Proxy server In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource. Instead of connecting directly to a server that can fulfill a request ...

encrypted e-mail Email encryption is encryption of email messages to protect the content from being read by entities other than the intended recipients. Email encryption may also include authentication. Email is prone to the disclosure of information. Most emails a ...

services,

anti-spyware Spyware (a portmanteau for spying software) is software with malicious behaviour that aims to gather information about a person or organization and send it to another entity in a way that harms the user—for example, by violating their privac ...

, anti-

phishing Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent (e.g., spoofed, fake, or otherwise deceptive) message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious softwar ...

, anti-

pharming Pharming is a cyberattack intended to redirect a website's traffic to another, fake site by installing a malicious program on the computer. Pharming can be conducted either by changing the hosts file on a victim's computer or by exploitation of a ...

and enterprise class competitive intelligence tools. Although these used to be separate products, Anonymizer has one product, Anonymizer Universal, as of early 2014.

Trademark

The term "anonymizer" is often used to signify any internet based

anonymization Data anonymization is a type of information sanitization whose intent is privacy protection. It is the process of removing personally identifiable information from data sets, so that the people whom the data describe remain anonymous. Overv ...

tool, even though it is a trademark of Anonymizer Inc.

References

External links