Tuesday, May 1, 2012

HideMyAss dot com

What HideMyAss say about themselves:

Use our free proxy to surf anonymously online, hide your IP address, secure your internet connection, hide your internet history, and protect your online identity.

The visit that prompted this post was one made to my page on Joshua Sham, a person that I have identified as a shill for OneWorldDataRecovery - if it were the intention that the visitor did not want me to know that they had visited and what pages they had accessed then they achieved the exact opposite.
   
 I regularly check my Google analytics reports and my server logs and the page reference that turned up in the GA report does not exist (obviously) on my server. This then prompted the search of the server log that then reveals the Hide My Ass access was to the page techwatch.ca/sham.html
 
In Google Analytics a visit to a specific webpage is obscured in the Analytics report by the substitution of a non-existent page. You will only be able to detect the visit if you check for visits to such pages that don't exist. Then, by cross referencing your server log you can see what actual pages were accessed and from where. While this is not as straight forward as just looking in Google Analytics for visits from specific users or to obtain browsing data about them, the use of HideMyAss does not stop the webmaster from determining that a visit had been made and from whom.

As far as the claim by HideMyAss that you can surf the Web anonymously, this is only partially true. The use of HideMyAss only makes the determination of the origin of the visit a little more complex for the Webmaster.

Links:

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

joshua hidemyass

Keywords but no City, Region or Country

Atlanta said...

what does hidemyass look like in google analytics

Larry walker said...
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