Other Crap

After being available since I can remember, Private Surfing, the free web-based Anonymizer product, has been discontinued.

The end of an era. It's been out there about ten years. The reasons cited were (1) very low conversion rate from the free product to the company's other products, despite overload on the free service (2) the difficulty (if not impossibility) of making an online proxy product that will work with such services as G-Mail and Google Maps.

The company's founder wrote: "Our web based private surfing service was discontinued for one reason. We could not use that technology to deliver the level and quality of service we feel our customers deserve. To effectively deliver a web-based service, one must either disable all active content (which will break most major websites these days) or try to detect and rewrite all links or redirect commands that may be embedded in web pages. It is impossible to do this completely. Any missed links will lead the user to connect directly to the target site and be left exposed. We have not stopped providing privacy services. They are all now client based. It is the only way to ensure the security of our users. We are in no way downsizing our services. There were so few active users of our Private Surfing service, compared to our other services; it made no sense to try to keep a broken product limping along."