There are many reasons one might wish to disguise information about their true identity online but businesses in particular have many reasons to disguise their identities especially during name searches for products, product lines, concepts, copyrightable or patentable information, or in gathering information.
An example of this basic concept is an attorney searching a company's website to see how a lawsuit against the company may be pursued for her client. Detecting and reviewing the click stream of our fictional attorney by the company under scrutiny possibly could provide any opposing attorney with advanced warning or information about which parts of the company's site are under scrutiny. These research patterns might provide early information which could allow an attorney to form a defense to shield their client during a later lawsuit.
Similarly information managers need to make employees aware that they should not perform competitive searches from their business domain through search engines on the open Web in order to protect confidential and bona fide trade secrets, as well as certain future plans which could be understood and anticipated through extrapolation.
Often it is the context of searches which reveal the source, kinds, and reasons for the search in the first place -- due to logging, tracking, triangulation, and other data mining techniques.
It's one thing if your customer is looking at the datasheet for your microprocessor, its another thing when your competition is looking at it (1). Same thing goes for your privacy policy or terms and conditions of use.
Having a 3rd party do the search or using an IP address anonymizer (proxy server which can hide IP addresses) may be used to conceal the searcher's context. Regular people can use such anonymizing proxy servers or services to conceal their identity, or VPN networks just to make the connection(2).
It is possible to contact your ISP to see how they may shield your searches and identity from others through masking. To investigate your ISP you can call and ask your ISP what information they keep, and how long they store these logs for(2). Still you may create personas to mask who you are over the net, or use computers which are not your own, or hire others to do your research via the internet.
Shoulder surfing or snooping has a completely different context when corporate secrets are involved, but the same data and click stream tracking techniques that can be used to investigate corporate issues can also be used to invade personal privacy and gather PII (Personally Identifiable Information).
Software such as Stealther can turn off browser downloading, disk cashing, cookies, digital referers, headers, saved form information, and recently closed tabs(2). Tor servers and onion routing anonymize searches(3). It requires a few extra steps when using the Internet, that may just be worth it.
(1) Glenn Von Tersch, instructor, Masters class, "Policy, Law, and Ethics in Information Management", University of Washington, Seattle, January 9, 2008.
(2). Bill Marriot, Dan Jenrette, Mimi Bidar, Masters Class Presentation, "Policy, Law, and Ethics in Information Management", University of Washington, Seattle, January 9, 2008.
(3). Linda Lane, Basic explanation of security through Tor Onion Routing previously published as "Hidden Services Tor, Onion Routing" on Ovi Magazine, http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/1904
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