[liberationtech] Anchor Free

[liberationtech at lewman.us]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2011 at 07:14:36PM -0800, companys at stanford.edu wrote 18K bytes in 338 lines about:
: Over the past couple of years, Hotspot Shield has proven to be a reliable
: way for people in countries like China and Tunisia to overcome government
: censorship and maintain their privacy and anonymity while using the
: Internet.

Ha.  There isn't much private nor anonymous about HSS. 

Read http://anchorfree.com/advertisers-agencies/.  How do you think they get
this data?  They have access to your entire datastream so they can inject
ads into it based on the content you are viewing.  They know who you
are, where you are going, what you are reading, and how long you spend
on each site.  Testing implies they are targeting keywords from your
emails as well.

Further, read http://anchorfree.com/privacy.html.  The first section
sounds great, they build a complete picture of how they protect your
real identity and privacy.  And then the rest of the document is about
how they strip it away, collate, sell, and profit from your identity and
traffic they are recording.

This situation doesn't sound like anonymity or privacy to me.

In theory, the only private part is the vpn between you and their
servers.  The vpn encryption could protect you from the jerk at
your coffee shop using firesheep or wireshark on the wifi connection.
https everywhere can likely do the same.  However, it's likely website
fingerprinting and other traffic analysis can reveal where you are going
on the internet pretty easily. Of course, so can shoulder surfing.

-- 
Andrew
pgp key: 0x74ED336B