David: Lance, please introduce yourself and tell us something about yourself.

Lance: I'm Lance Cottrell, founder and president of Anonymizer, Inc. I started the company more than ten years ago while working on my Ph.D.at UCSD (University of California at San Diego). While there, I set up the Web server and created the Web site for our research group. I was shocked to learn about the amount of information that was disclosed about people just visiting our site.

Matters of privacy became more and more important as I began studying the issues, so I set to work on a way to conceal private or personally-identifiable information. I developed free open source privacy solutions between 1992 and 1995. When I realized that it would require more resources than I could volunteer to provide a powerful, reliable, easy to use, and widely available product, Anonymizer was born.

David: My understanding is your company helps people prevent identity theft and keep their identities anonymous. How are these two topics related?

Lance: Most people think they're anonymous while connected to the Internet because they don't have the face-to-face interaction that they would with people at the grocery store, for example. However, the Internet is quite the opposite -- it's as if someone were following you while you shopped, tracking everything you put into your cart.

Now imagine that same person following you to every place you visited, every person you spoke with, looking over your shoulder at every item you purchased. Over time, this person would have an enormous amount of information about you.

Anonymizer solutions help people protect their privacy and identities by concealing who they are in order to ensure they can't be tracked. In addition, we also protect against the latest online threats that are used to commit identity theft or online fraud; these include spyware, phishing scams, and pharming attacks.