anonymiser : Java Glossary

• To avoid reprisals from people who don’t want your message heard. The most common reprisals are telephone death threats to you and/or your family.
• To make people focus on your message, not on who said it.
• To deceive people into thinking there is more support for your position than there actually is.
• To camouflage your vested interests, e.g. the name of the company you work for.
• To attract the attention of the authorities.

Hacking

Let’s say you used an anonymiser late at night and you were the only user. A professional hacker watching your stream going in knows it matches the single anonymised stream going out. Let’s say you visit a porn site belamionline.com once a day. The hacker can track where the incoming streams are coming from and the outgoing anononimised streams are going over a week or two. He would notice that someone goes to belamionline.com every time you login. It does not take much deduction to figure out it is you. All this is going to do is make it more awkward for someone to track you. The anonymiser is primarily to stop belamionline.com from figuring out who you are.

People eventually give themselves away by accidentally posting an anonymous message without an anonymiser, or by accidentally posting an ordinary message anonymously, or even by their style, spelling and vocabulary.

You can find anonymiser sites with google. Most are hard to use. Most are awkward to use. I have no idea how to judge how trustworthy each one is.