With 240 million users of the Internet in existence throughout the U.S. today, it makes ideal sense why online privacy software would be so prevalent. Sure, the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, monitors are tracking activities that companies conduct to perform competitive analysis and know where their online users are heading, but from the commercial end of things companies have to be smarter about how they go about using this online privacy software. This includes utilizing techniques and products like those that allow for anonymous browsing, those that offer IP address privacy and those that prevent data scraping from happening, which occurs when programs take data from outputs that can be read by humans and that come from other programs.
Aside from using an anonymizer, companies today are getting smarter about using virtual private networks, or VPNs, which encrypt a site or a company’s data that is transmitted via a mobile device or computer to keep that information from being hacked into or intercepted. They are getting wiser as well about how and when they display online advertising, either via their sites from other companies or on their own as online advertisers. The market for this has jumped from its most recent number to $34.4 billion as of the end of last year, which translates into a 36 percent growth over the previous year. Online privacy software aims to equip these sites and companies with these useful technologies and more to keep them anonymous and to safeguard their data.