Remember the days (the early 1990s) when the Internet was still in its infancy and its wealth of content (porn) could be enjoyed freely and with relative anonymity? Lately, though, surfing the Net has come to feel more like navigating through a crowd of thieves, with many sites extracting personal information about their visitors and, in the process, leaving a user’s computer laden with hidden files that provide a nosy girlfriend or roommate with compelling evidence of your last visit to www.hotandhairyhungarianhousewives.com.
The anonymous Web-surfing days of yore may soon return if Brandon K. Guttman ’00-’02 has his way. Guttman and his business partner Dan Houston ’01 recently unveiled the first commercial version of Jimmy Surf, software that promises to keep an Internet user’s net history a secret between him, his god and, well, Jimmy Surf.
Jimmy Surf is billed as the one-stop shop for restoring near-total privacy to all Internet escapades. The program works by targeting cookies, which are digital tracking devices sent by websites to a user’s computer in order to follow the user’s movements on the Net. Unlike other privacy software, which simply prevents sites from sending cookies, Jimmy Surf actually permits a cookie to be sent by the website to your computer and then destroys it, so you still have complete access to all sites that require cookies to be enabled. In addition, Jimmy Surf also clears a browser’s history, prevents unwelcome homepage switches and does away with those irritatingly relentless pop-up windows that only those with total mastery of their left mouse button can overcome.
Perhaps the most ingenious of Jimmy Surf’s features, however, is that users access the program through www.jimmysurf.com, which means there are no Jimmy Surf desktop icons to indicate a covering of one’s Internet tracks. For doubting Thomases (or skeptical porn fiends, as it were) who want to witness Jimmy Surf work his magic before signing up for the $7.95 per month service, Guttman even offers a free downloadable two-week trial version. With over 11,000 downloads in the two months since its Internet debut, Jimmy Surf seems to be riding a veritable tsunami of popularity.
Guttman claims that Jimmy Surf is not simply for the undersexed middle-aged male who spends most of his free time trying to figure out how much porn can fit on a 40GB hard drive. According to Guttman, “Jimmy Surf is more about privacy than it is about porn,” he says. Guttman says that even someone who simply wants to browse espn.com while at work can make use of Jimmy Surf. “Most people just really like to see their stats add up,” he says, referring to the Jimmy Surf interface, which tracks each cookie that has been “crumbled” and each pop-up window that has been “popped.”
Praise abounds for Jimmy Surf in Internet chat rooms, on bulletin boards and in newsgroups as well as among members of the Harvard computing community. Nicholas D. Zeitlin ’02 is one such Harvard web surfer who appreciates the privacy that Jimmy Surf affords. “I think anyone who uses the Internet would like it—particularly if you spend a lot of time looking at porn,” Zeitlin says. “Of course, I don’t do that.”
Perhaps the most revealing praise of Jimmy Surf can be found on www.jimmysurf.com, which displays the exceedingly (and eerily) thankful letters of its contented users, such as one letter from FK in Palm Springs. “I use [Jimmy Surf] to surf my sister’s computer and she never finds out where I’ve been online,” extols FK. What sites has the Californian been frequenting? Thanks to Guttman and Houston, the world and FK’s poor sister will never know.
