The folks at a small Internet service provider are offering a way to keep your connection to the Internet completely anonymous -- provided that you trust them.
The Anonymous Dialup service by Anonymizer Inc. provides an anonymous connection to the Internet and includes email, newsgroup, and Web access.
"We're allowing people to get dial-in accounts, pay for them and maintain them without providing us any information [about themselves]," said Lance Cottrell, CEO of Anonymizer, calling from a conference on privacy hosted by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
"It's primarily designed to allow people to use the Internet and be secure against the release of personal information," he said today.
For US$60, you get three months of service, where "your cyberspace life is divorced from meatspace," as Cottrell puts it. It's just like an ordinary dialup account from any ISP -- with supported connection speeds from 28.8 to 56k -- except that you use a handle for an account name, and steps are taken on Anonymizer's end to separate any traceable information about yourself, such as IP number, so that your Internet transactions can't be indexed back to your location.
The service is currently available in more than a dozen cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and San Diego. Others in line for the service include Portland, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Kansas City, Denver, and Baltimore-Washington, DC.
To ensure anonymity, the company does not even require users to identify themselves when purchasing the service.
"People can pay for it any way they want, and the choice of payment method would depend on the level of security they're looking for," said Cottrell. "People looking for the most security would use a more anonymous method of payment, such as cash or money order."
Still, Anonymous Dialup is not targeted at people who need military-grade security. An encrypting tunneling service will be made available for users who want to connect to the company's servers over a secure link, so that traffic between the ISP and the user cannot be monitored.
"The primary intrusion that we're protecting against here is access to information by the person's local ISP or place of business and to keep people from being able to identify the person who is acting on the Internet," Cottrell said. "They're worried about participating in discussions and then having the contents of that discussion become public later so some future employer says, 'Oh, you've been reading alt.sex.bondage.hamsters. I don't want to hire you.'"
Avi Rubin, co-author of The Web Security Sourcebook and one of two AT&T research scientists behind the collaborative Web anonymity tool Crowds, is skeptical.
"The main problem that I have is that they're claiming to provide an anonymity service where you're protected by certain kinds of people, but they are able to be aware of everything that's going on," said Rubin. "For instance, the Anonymizer Web service can build a record of everybody and what they're browsing, which can potentially be sold or used for blackmail."
Rubin said that the centralized design of Anonymous Dialup is dangerous if you're really concerned about anonymity, since you have to place all of your trust in one place: Anonymizer Inc.
"My biggest concern with a small company starting up and offering guaranteed anonymity is that they don't have much at stake. They could almost make more money selling the information than from all their customers combined," Rubin said.
Cottrell acknowledges that the Anonymous Dialup model requires users to place their unconditional trust in his company. But he says that the track record is there: The company has a good reputation that it intends to keep.
"I think we've stood out in providing these technologies. We run the Anonymizer, we developed Mixmaster, and continue to offer it as a free service," Cottrell said. "I think that people recognize that we don't look at this simply as a business but really almost as a calling."
He said Anonymizer is signing up with companies like Truste to provide fourth-party verification of its trustworthiness and its handling of personal data and information.
"Trust and reputation is really the bread and butter of our business," Cottrell said. "Were we at any time to violate that trust and compromise a user's integrity, our name would be mud. And on the Internet, it would be mud very quickly. So the maintaining of absolute integrity, and the protection of our customers' privacy, is really core to the survival of our business, so we have a very vested interest [in it]."
With companies like Anonymizer blazing a commercial path in this field -- its anonymous Web browsing service currently has over 4,000 paying users -- perhaps some company will invest in the development of such a system.
"Providing privacy actually pays," Cottrell said, "I was very pleased to find that out. There was some doubt early on in the Cypherpunks, when people didn't know if privacy was something the public valued enough to actually pay for. The evidence is that they definitely do."
