Labs

The special feature of Steganos is anonymous surfing. Every computer on the Net has a unique IP address (a string of numbers, such as 82.38.125.52), and any Web site you connect to can read yours. Steganos points out that companies can use this to compile data about your Web usage, violating your online privacy.

In reality, most home users are assigned a different IP address each time they connect to the Internet. Businesses and keen network gamers are more likely to have a fixed IP, and this provides a target for hackers. One benefit of Anonym would be to protect against them. Another would be if you think someone is monitoring your online activity, and you wanted to make yourself as hard to trace as possible.

It's impressive to see a map of the world showing your apparent location switching every second, like something out of 24. Steganos works by using 'proxy servers', which

A toolbar added to your browser (Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape or Opera) lets you block cookies, pop-ups and other annoyances, and prevent sites detecting which browser you're using or which page you've come from. Finally, Private Favorites creates a password-protected folder for your secret URLs.

Steganos's secure deletion utility, Shredder, can shred your data by overwriting it once, or using a multiple-overwrite method that meets US Department of Defense guidelines. A third option, the 'Gutmann method', involves 35 overwrites - but it's slow. Even the basic option defeated our undelete software. You can also 'deep clean' free drive space to remove any traces of earlier files.

Internet Trace Destructor removes signs of your activity in Web browsers, chat services, KaZaA and other applications, plus Windows itself. Once you've chosen which records you want to destroy, you can use a shortcut to shred them at will, or do it every time you close your browser.

Supported applications are limited and don't include e-mail. Nor can you add named files or folders to the list for deletion.

Trace Destructor can detect recently accessed content that 'may not be suitable for young people', but from a site consisting entirely of porn links, it only picked out a single banner.

If anonymity isn't a major concern, we'd say look elsewhere.