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When I visit a website, they get information about me such as IP address, country etc.

  1. What are other ways/other information with that they can identify me/my connection?
  2. How can I change/mask this information?

I know that proxy helps, but does it really works and they cant see my IP address?

Neil Smithline
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urgot
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1 Answers1

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First of all, they don't get your country. Although they can make a connection between an IP-Adress and a location through Geo-IP databases. These are fairly accurate with most of the IPv4 Addresses.

Other things to track you are for example cookies and other information sent by your client. Panopticklick lists them in a nice readable form. ( https://panopticlick.eff.org ) Remember, apart from the things your client transmits they only see your IP-Adress and your request.

Yes a Proxy hides your IP from the final destination, but the proxy can still make the connection between the requests and your IP. And for most ISP the IP-Adress is not really uniquely as the assign them dynamically or even NAT all your requests. So your IP is not really the problem if you want to protect against tracking from a website.

But the bigger problem is that your client still send's a lot of data, which can still uniquely identify you. The TOR Project tackles this problem by distributing a Browser-Bundle which is configured not to send these informations or delete them after restart because some websites need these informations to work properly. So every Tor Browser looks the same and can't be distinguished after a browser restart. Two of the main things to do is deactivate cookies and javascript as they are responsible for most of the additional data sent to the server. But the Tor-Browser Bundle is a good example how to configure a browser to be as least identifiable as possible.

alyberty
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  • but they can read only cookies that are related to the website im visiting, so if i delete cookies, they can get them back, right? or are they storing them in some server database? so if i understand correctly, with proxy they can still see my IP adress, but only difference is, that in way will be more random ip adresses? – urgot Dec 04 '15 at 01:27
  • They see the IP address of the proxy @urgot. – Neil Smithline Dec 04 '15 at 03:52
  • so if i use proxy, on server side they cant identify my ip adress? – urgot Dec 04 '15 at 11:17
  • Correct - they only see the ip address of the proxy, always implicating that you don't send any additional information yourself. – alyberty Dec 07 '15 at 00:21