Connecting to the internet with your Mac may be more public than you think. Even in the privacy of your own home, there's a chance that what you do online is being observed, recorded, and logged somewhere. It might be your ISP maintaining servers. It might be your government looking for terrorists. It might be your hacker-wannabe next door neighbor that hijacked your wifi and is snooping for passwords. Anonymous surfing software for Mac can be downloaded and used very easily. Here are some things worth knowing about this kind of software.

It's called a VPN, which stands for "virtual private network". That's just what it is - a private network of servers that assigns you a virtual IP address. When you sign up for a VPN service, you are allowed to access these servers. You're then assigned an anonymous IP (virtual IP) by the network. This is your new identity online. It can be used to

• unblock websites
• hide your real IP
• protect yourself from eavesdropping
• access geo restricted websites
• prevent your ISP and government from eavesdropping and online profiling

I don't like to push too much about online profiling and protecting your online activity from the eyes of the government because it sounds a bit too extreme, and I don't really care that much. But what does matter is connecting to a VPN to hide your IP while you use a shared internet connection. It could be at a dorm, at a hotel or airport, and even at your local wifi cafe. The point that most people don't know is that sharing an internet connecting with someone means that they can monitor your internet traffic too. All it takes is software to do deep packet searching, and they can monitor all traffic on the network - both theirs and yours.

And though your home internet connection is generally considered safe, more and more people are using wifi to make connecting to the internet anywhere in the house convenient. What you forget is that your neighbors, after watching a couple of YouTube videos can probably figure out how to crack your password and share the internet with you. You're now at the same problem of shared internet.

VPNs for Mac are available at VPN services. You can find their websites on the internet. No hardware is needed to get the VPN working. Once downloaded, installed and connected, it runs in the background and you do all your normal internet activity with a private, anonymous IP address. You can choose an IP from your own country, or get one from another country to unlock websites that are blocked based on IP. Unblocking Hulu and Netflix outside the USA is a good example of this. VPN services don't keep logs of your online activity, meaning your connecting is totally private. Most will keep a 'time stamp' however, so they can identify abusive users if necessary.