I agree. There is no hiding from the court system or authorities. There are various mutual cooperation treaties where a subpoena in the United States can be enforced in countries like Canada. The countries do not have mutual cooperation treaties might have unknown handshake agreements. For example, China. Although there is no mutual cooperation treaties between the US and China, they could probably do a handshake agreement. I would not trust any service in any country to truly guard your privacy 100%. Both of the services do have disclaimers that they will turn over information to the authorities at their discretion...translation...the authorities dont really need a subpoena...they just have to have a good reason that will satisfy them. Hushmail does have a policy that they will only turn over information by order of the Canadian courts.
The last thing I will say that a privacy expert explained to me is that any off the shelf product available in the US has a backdoor built in for the US gov.
Excuse my slowness, but didn't you just prove yourself wrong showing that anonymizer slowed your speed by 70%??? You always have to pay the price for anonymity. I generally agree with you, it would be better if you could stay in private on the net, but you have to realize there is no absolute privacy, unless you are a decent hacker... ...and in your last post you acknowledged that no proxy server can protect your identity from government agencies. So thanks for nothing....
One time i posted a comment on a story at a newspaper website. Somebody responded to my comment in another comment and used my real name. It became obvious to me that someone at the newspaper didn't like what I said and decided to use their ability to access my info in an attempt to try and bully me.
Really? Did you have to register though to make this comment? And when you registered did you just happen to put your name in the "First Name" box? Not trying to sound like a dick, haha. But am interested.
Dude, if you're so worried they might reveal your porn surfing habits on the front page of your local rag one morning, then just don't do it.
What if you are a person who loves internet chat rooms and message boards? Lets take this site for example. Do you trust the management at Elitetrader with your ip address and location? There have been times in the past where moderators pointed out a poster's location.
Please excuse my ignorance, but doesn't using a cable modem internet provider which assigns you a new IP address at each logon doing the same thing?
+1 Mod indeed do that occasionally when they fail to handle their emotions proving that they are human after all
Here is the other benefit that I forgot to mention. By using one of these services, any internet data that goes between your laptop and the proxy server is encrypted. You are basically on a VPN. There are always ways around encryption, but you would need the equipment and to know what you are doing to break it which means 99.9% of everyone out there would not be able to look at what you are doing. When would this be important? For example, lets say you travel a lot and use public wi-fi. Lets say you use your personal computer at work over their lines. These services would stop man in the middle attacks. Lets say you handle a lot of sensitive transactions involving large amounts of money over your computer then a VPN setup is absolutely essential.