Introduction
 Privacy settings
 Visited sites
 New sites
 Whois this?
 Actions

 Table of Contents
 Questions

Introduction

The Privacy Center is your one-stop location for Internet privacy. From here, you can manage any sites privacy settings; change privacy settings for groups of sites; and instruct GhostSurf how to treat new sites.

Privacy settings

For any site or group of sites, you can:

• Block that site completely from sending you pages and images; and from getting information from you.
• Block popups from that site.
• Block personal information. Your requests are modified when sent to the site to remove anything that can identify you.
• Route requests through an anonymous hub. The site can't see your IP address.

There are pluses and minuses to each of these features. The minus for all is that, when enabled, web surfing will be slower. For some (including blocking personal information) the slowdown is so small it is almost necessarily not noticeable. For others (including blocking popups), the slowdown may be noticeable. For anonymous hubs, the slowdown may be small or significant, depending on how fast the hub you're using is.

We recommend you block personal information from all sites (except those sites that require it, like web-based e-mail sites); this will protect your privacy, and won't effectively slow down your connection. We recommend you block popups only from sites you know display popups; that way you won't waste time filtering sites that don't. And we recommend you route requests through anonymous hubs only when you're really concerned about privacy. Any normal website can't use your IP address for anything meaningful; anonymous hubs should be used only for sites you expect to be very malicious.

Visited websites

The visited websites list shows all the sites you've visited; you can sort them by name, date last visited, or amount of traffic using the column headers. Right-clicking on a site brings up a menu; from this, you can change the site's privacy settings. Please see the above section for more information on privacy settings.

New websites

The "new websites" box lets you set the privacy settings of websites you have not yet visited. If, for example, you select the "block personal information..." box, new websites you visit will not be able to collect your personal information.

Whois this?

GhostSurf can query the Internet's WHOIS database for you, to tell you who owns a particular website. You can learn more about this in the WHOIS utility article. To look up this information for a website, right-click it in the Privacy Control Center and choose "Whois this?" from the menu that appears.

Actions

When you click on the "Actions..." button, the Actions window (shown to the right) will appear. It lets you change a many websites' privacy settings at once. First, choose which sites you'd like to affect; you can change all sites' privacy settings, some sites that match the name you enter, or you can select a group of sites manually. Next, select the action you would like to perform. Actions are listed in the "Choose action" box. When you're ready, click on the "Perform the action(s)" button. If you would like more information on selecting sites, please see the Selecting Sites article.