User:Jeblad/Rewrite of external links

Rewrite of external links can be done to increase the privacy of readers and users of a wiki. As a user edits a page the timestamp can be connected with accesses on other pages. Especially the existence of the referrer field in the head requests for in the http-protocol makes this simple. By redirecting the request through a rewrite engine the referrer information can be removed, thereby ensuring the user an increased degree of privacy. It is not impossible to connect the named users to the ip-address, as the history for the articles are available, but it is seriously more difficult.

Another very potent way to force the browsers to drop the referrer data is to use the secure server. When the user goes from a HTTPS-connection to a HTTP-connection the referrer is dropped