As far as your internet provider is concerned, they will, and have the right to, record all of your activity; read your internet provider terms of service. Even if you use a proxy, they at least record your contact with the proxy site and then some proxy sites may record your activity through their service. Some reading for you:

• http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000982.htm
• http://www.onlineanonymity.org/anonymity-online-why-bother/
• http://whatismyipaddress.com/internet-anonymity
• find other information by using your search engine(s) to look for internet anonymity or online anonymity

The main thing that you can do is to protect your private information on the internet (information that you share about yourself on the internet with sites or other users, cookies, browsing history, etc.) so that malicious sites are not as aware of your online activity. Also keep all of your software and your operating system up to date to prevent leaks. Use a good firewall, limit your downloads to necessary items, be careful of the sites that you visit and scan regularly for viruses and malware with a good up to date scanner.

You can use proxies and software that encrypt the data on your Internet usage.

If you are looking to hide your IP address from your ISP to protect your privacy, or you want to be able to access websites that are being blocked by your Internet provider, you can accomplish this successfully by using a VPN, also known as a virtual private network.

This might help:

http://superuser.com/questions/351761/does-using-tor-prevent-my-isp-sysadmin-from-seeing-what-sites-i-visit

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en

Paid version: http://www.steganos.com/uk/products/

Tor is the only open source program that I know off: https://www.torproject.org/

Hope this answers your question. If so, mark as solved. Thank you.

TOR does not offer complete anonymity. Read the following thoroughly (nothing has really changed in this regard since this 2007 thread). In addition, when using TOR, you are trusting unknown people, the nodes, with information passing through them, and you do not know whether their systems are secure and up to date.

• http://www.wilderssecurity.com/archive/index.php/t-193007.html

Some of the same applies to VPN usage.

Your ISP always knows, and records, at least your first contact on the internet.

If you want to go the other way and trace deleted history for a specific day can you contact ISP for history list? Am desperately trying to find out if there's a way to trace a tracking number I entered into Royal Mail's tracking service a couple of months ago and am trying to get the browsing history for the day I entered it on their website.

Hi alex_cissokho, you should ask your ISP what they have. I don't think most ISP's save the details of form submissions. They know the URLs, so if the tracking number was in the URL, they should have that, that least for a few months. Of course, your Firefox history might also have that.

But if the number was one field in a form, I do not think most ISPs want to save that kind of information for privacy reasons.

Furthermore, if you were using a form that was on an HTTPS connection, what your ISP sees is mostly undecipherable gibberish.

So I think the odds of getting it are not very good.

If this is for a legal matter, have your attorney/solicitor call to see whether they can release something in response to a subpoena that they do not give out on a simple request.

Hi - thanks for response. Unfortunately my Firefox settings were set to delete browse history on quitting Firefox. Have tried the Time Machine route on my Mac but only seem to have weekly backups beyond a certain point and when I restore them it just shows one particular day's history (probably due to my Firefox settings) but not the right day. Should have kept hold of that receipt I guess!