Anonymizer, Inc. is an

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

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 David Chaum's mix network. ...

. 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, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

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'', for example) but exceptionally may ...

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

History

The Patriot Act, which was signed in October 2001 in response to the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

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

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, hardware, and cyber security company, registered in Florida and based in Herndon, Virginia.Alex Spillius"Pentagon buys social networking 'spy software'" ''The Telegraph'', March 17, 2011. Retrieved March 24, 201 ...

Products

Anonymizer offers a variety of consumer information security services including

VPN Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not c ...

for multi-protocol proxy, client software for

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

and

iPad The iPad is a brand of tablet computers developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple that run the company's mobile operating systems iOS and later iPadOS. The IPad (1st generation), first-generation iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010. ...

, an anonymizer Proxy server, encrypted e-mail services,

anti-spyware Spyware (a portmanteau for spying software) is any malware that aims to gather information about a person or organization and send it to another entity in a way that harms the user by violating their privacy, endangering their device's security, ...

, anti-

phishing Phishing is a form of social engineering and a scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as viruses, worms, adware, or ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticate ...

, anti-

pharming Pharming is a cyberattack intended to redirect a website's traffic to another, fake site by installing a malicious program on the victim's computer in order to gain access to it. Pharming can be conducted either by changing the hosts file on a vi ...

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. Overvi ...

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

References

External links