What It Does
Anonymizer 2004 acts as a proxy for all of your public Internet connections. Basically, when Anonymizer 2004 is active your computer only talks to the Anonymizer servers which in turn contact the destination server you want to connect with. The destination server replies to the Anonymizer proxy which then forwards the data to your computer. Any malicious code or attempts to gather private or identifying information will only get as far as the Anonymizer proxy which shields your computer and information from any attacks or spying.How It Performed
Frankly, I was not overly impressed. For starters, I do consider privacy to be a concern and I would prefer to have personally identifying information kept confidential, but not at the cost of speed or performance.While using this product I saw a noticeable decline in the speed of my Internet access. Many pages simply timed out and were unreachable. Each time I was able to regain my network performance and access the web page in question simply by turning off Anonymizer 2004.
Overall I would say that when it worked it worked. In other words, when I wasn't having such severe Internet connectivity problems that I had to turn the program off it worked as advertised in terms of blocking my private information and protecting my computer.
Tech support was very helpful. In the end though they didn't actually solve my problem or help me make this product work. They recommended that I upgrade to their more robust Total Net Shield product and gave me a free upgrade for my troubles.
Conclusion
For me, the Total Net Shield product has worked significantly better than Anonymizer 2004. I found Anonymizer 2004 to have too much of a negative impact on my network performance and ability to connect to the Internet to be worth protecting my personal information.In fairness to Anonymizer I will say that I do not have a "lab" environment. It is entirely possible that the problems I had were a factor of my own unique network architecture and not the fault of Anonymizer directly. That said, I had problems with Anonymizer 2004 turned on and I had no problems with Anonymizer 2004 turned off.
If privacy is a paramount concern for you I would recommend giving this product a try, but if you have the extra money I would recommend investing in the more robust and full-featured Total Net Shield product instead.