Don’t mistake this discussion as related to “man in the middle” attacks.
Middle man protection describes having a middle man act as your agent in some kind of transaction.
In effect when you subscribe to Anonymizer or Tor you are making use of a middle man for your internet connection. Their anonymous servers sit between you and the web so only their IP address can be identified. Your IP address is not disclosed, with the end server receiving the middle man’s IP address instead.
Similarly, the most effective tool in privacy protection is using a middle man for purchases.
This involves having a third party, such as the Secure Surfing Organization, actually purchase a product or service you want and you pay the middle man for acting in your place.
It is not uncommon for businesses and professionals to use numbered companies, lawyers or agents to achieve the same result, secrecy, in all kinds of activities.
For individuals the professional fees involved in such services is prohibitive. But there are alternatives, some of them very valuable from a privacy perspective.
A regular membership with the Secure Surfing Organization includes an annual subscription to the Anonymizer service. Middle man protection in this case can prove very useful since even if Anonymizer itself was forced to hand over records, whether to the U.S. government or the Chinese government, the only records that they would have would not include your identity. The financial records would should that Secure Surfing purchased some number of Anonymizer subscriptions, and the records of Anonymizer would contain the identifying information of the Secure Surfing Organization only.
Accessing Secure Surfing Organization’s own records would only show a list of members because what you buy is a membership that includes certain services such as an Anonymizer Safe Surfing Suite account. Simply, you pay the SSO fee of $79.00 and $35.00 of that amount is used to purchase the Anonymizer service.
We do not buy Anonymizer accounts according to a specific membership. The user name and password we provide you to access Anonymizer is selected from available accounts we have in inventory. We do not keep a record of which member has which Anonymizer account so our records cannot be used to tie you to your internet activities. Not even we have the ability to track your internet habits and so there is nothing for us to surrender to a court order.
Skype provides the highest level of privacy over its connections through sophisticated encryption and distributed packet techniques. However, it remains possible for Skype itself to profile you and to share the profile information in ways that are not obvious, but not illegal.
If instead of you subscribing to Skype, Secure Surfing subscribes to Skype and turns over the login name and password to you, then all that anyone can know from the transaction records is that Secure Surfing added another account to its portfolio. In this way, you can have a phone number in almost any country in the world and there is no one to say you do not live in that country. Note that a paid Skype account is not part of the base membership and a fee is required to receive this optional service.
Your credit card company or PayPal cannot use these purchases to build profiles of you. These purchases cannot be connected to other information about you to compromise your privacy or freedom to make your own decisions.
If you want to buy a book about coping with depression, Amazon does not need that in its records. Middle man protection can be used for any product or service that can be transferred to you without breaking any laws or being redundant. For example it would be redundant for privacy purposes to use a middle man to purchase a car because once the car is turned over to you, you would still have to personally register and insure it.
Instead of using Virtual Identities, middle man services can create secure email addresses not connected to your real contact information.
Trying to use a middle man to subscribe to child porn is clearly illegal and the middle man would be required to disclose your identity (we’d turn you over ourselves, immediately and without notice) and themselves be guilty of an offense, so middle man services are useless for criminal activities. But it would be legal to subscribe to adult pornography and so long as all that is required is a user name and password, these can be easily purchased and transferred to you.
Limits to Middle Man Services
Middle man services are not suited to speedy reaction, so taking advantage of a hot deal is unlikely to work effectively.
Middle man services are not suited to purchases that require a physical delivery without offering an alternate delivery location in the ordering process. So subscriptions to print magazines are not fully effective . You would still be able to mask the name and financial transaction, but the delivery address would be your real address.
To do complete service for products that require physical delivery you would need to use a mail-forwarding service which is typically more costly than can be justified. Shipping costs double.
Middle man services cannot be used for establishing financial accounts with banks or payment services such as PayPal. Such services require a legal entity (person or business) and if it is not illegal to use pseudonyms and alternate contact information, it is likely to breach the terms of service in an instance where it really matters.
The very best use of middle man service is in registering an Anonymizer account, a Skype account, software, downloadable music and moves and similar web services that require only a name and password be delivered to the end consumer.
