Leaving electronical traces or not?
In general, visiting sites like Overgrow generates electronic traces at following places:
- client PC with its OS and browser
- routing internet nodes
- Overgrow.com server (or other destination)
Lets look at what you can do about it in particular.
Your PC should be clean of viruses. Your operating system needs to be regularly updated, to prevent security holes and exploits. When you visit the site through www browser, site uses cookies to track your actions on the site.
In case you would like to wipe this cookies from the browser, you can do it manually through browser settings. In that case also clear history of browsing.
And there is also other way. Both Firefox and Internet explorer are offering “privacy mode” which doesn’t save any data into your client computer without your attention (off course if you don’t for example download some files yourself). After you close this private window all history is wiped out automatically.
From your browser your request goes through serie of nodes routing your traffic through the internet. Your data packets include your IP address, so each node knows where to return requested data. This also means that every router on the way can possibly “be aware” that you are communicating with some site. All data that you are communicating are properly encrypted using SSL. Overgrow.com does this as default and doesn’t offer non-encrypted connection.
Overgrow also cleans its database regularly and after 7 days since member’s last visit IP data about regular users are destroyed. We keep IP addresses only of active connections so we can serve them and also to defend our server against attack by blacklisting offending IP addresses.
In case you would still be interested in hiding your IP address you can use Tor project. This software package includes own mini www browser (based on Firefox) to give you encrypted and anonymous web browsing. It routes your connection through many other Tor nodes ensuring that destination routers will get some random IP address from any part of the world. The fact is that with increasing number of network hops decreases connection speed.