Avanquest Ghostsurf Platinum

The view that the Internet offers complete anonymity been accepted as untrue, but there are ways to preserve privacy while online.

Ghostsurf Platinum: Identity Protector from Avanquest is a collection of utilities to protect personal information while surfing the web.

Installation is straightforward. The setup wizard covers all the important information and gives the new proxy settings for accessing the Internet.

Settings for Internet Explorer are changed automatically, but other browsers may need manual tweaking. Using these proxy settings, all traffic is routed through the Tenebril servers for anonymous surfing.

The Privacy Control Center provides access to the various tools and also houses a simple slider for switching between the different levels of security.

When slid all the way to Secure, all personal information is blocked and all information is encrypted.

You can also call up a list of all traffic that has passed through the computer. This doesn't just include web browsing, but other traffic such as those programs that are constantly checking for updates.

It is also possible to exclude sites, such as online banking sites, from the privacy settings to make sure that they still work.

Protection from spyware is handled by Spycatcher. This has a particularly good process for identifying the source of the warning, making sure that an installation program is not stopped erroneously.

Other features such as cookie removal are also available. Read a full review of Spycatcher here.

Another tool is the Personal Data Vault - a secure place to hold passwords, sensitive files and Internet bookmarks.

The latter can be imported from Internet Explorer, while files can be dragged and dropped into the Data Vault.

Less malicious, but certainly no less annoying, pop up advertising is stopped by Adarmor. During testing, this made a noticeable different to browsing sites with lots of advertising, however some sneaky pop-ups still managed to squeeze through.

Finally, Trackscleaner can securely delete files on the computer using a variety of different techniques. A quick delete options is available, but the Gutmann's Algorithm option, which overwrites the data 35 times, is far more secure.

Recently opened file lists can also be imported for deletion and regular cleanups scheduled.

Ghostsurf does exactly what it intends to but, while the Spycatcher and Adarmor tools are handy, we doubt the majority of surfers actually require the advanced privacy controls.

System requirements:
Pentium 350MHz
64MB of Ram
16MB disk space
Windows 2000/XP