Programs give you back some of your privacy on the Web

technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Programs give you back some of your privacy on the Web

Sept. 27, 2000

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   Whenever you visit a Web site, you give up a little of your privacy. You can stop these intrusions with software designed to block suspicious and invasive activities.
   I tried out two privacy-protection programs. One, AdSubtract, comes only in a Windows version. The other, WebWasher, is available for Windows, the Macintosh and, soon, Linux.
   Both of them let you choose what Web sites can find out about you by controlling cookies and "Web bugs."
   Cookies are notes Web sites store on your computer. Some of them are helpful and should not be deleted; others are intrusive and should be blocked. Web bugs are images so small they can't be seen. They're used not for display but to track what your browser is doing.
    Both programs also let you turn off "referrers," which can tell Web sites who you are and where you came from. And they can block advertising banners and another annoyances, such as animated pictures and background music.
   AdSubtract is available for free in a "lite" version, but the two commercial versions ($15 and $30) have many extra features. You can buy the commercial versions or download the free version from http://www.adsubtract.com.
   WebWasher is free for everyone except commercial offices. (Universities and other schools get it free, too.) Commercial licenses for WebWasher cost $20 to $30 per user, depending on the total.
   Go to www.webwasher.com to download the program for Windows or the Mac.
    Pro, the $30 version, on my wife's Windows PC, and I tested WebWasher on a Windows PC I use for backups. (My other PCs don't run Windows.) Both worked well, but each one did an awkward job of handling cookies.
    If you change your browser so that it always asks for permission before allowing cookies to be stored or sent back, you can easily turn into a babbling idiot. Both AdSubtract Pro and WebWasher try to automate this, but they fall far short of the way it should be done.
   (And the way it should be done is the method used by Cookie Pal, the best cookie manager for Windows. You need it if you use a Windows PC on the Web and care about privacy. Try it free from http://www.kburra.com/cpdown.html.)
   But both AdSubtract Pro and WebWasher did a fine job in other areas. They blocked ads (although AdSubtract Pro was far easier to set up for this) and they both did well protecting privacy. I especially liked the way I could block entire categories of things - all animated graphics, for example.
    Both programs can work behind a firewall and both can be directed to connect to a proxy. But only WebWasher, the free program, is able to serve as a central proxy itself for multiple computers.
    In other words, if you have computers on a network, all of them can be set up to use a single WebWasher-equipped PC as their gateway for access. This means a network administrator at a small school could set up a Windows PC running WebWasher as the proxy server for other computers on a network.