What is Ion?
Ion is a tool that enables faster, non-attributable access to online data. Ion supports web harvesting, also known as web scraping or automated data collection, by routing your website traffic through tens of thousands of non-attributable IP addresses that compose Ion’s vast network. The Ion network facilitates the collection of website data regardless of how deep you drill into a website.
How does Ion enable faster collection?
Other third-party IP masking solutions can slow your collection efforts or even impede them. Bandwidth limitations, the number of available or working IPs or routing hops, and the ability to run concurrent requests and/or connections, all factor in to your large-scale data collection success.
Many providers use residential IP addresses and actually route your traffic through the in-home devices of consumers, subjecting you to the speed and reliability limitations of an unknown provider.
Ion enables you to collect information faster by running a high volume of concurrent requests with each request coming from a different, known IP address over a high-quality network.
How can Ntrepid help me with web scraping software?
With Ion, you can disperse web harvesting queries across thousands of anonymous IP addresses, allowing your traffic to blend in with every other website visitor. Ntrepid can help you auto-rotate an IP address with every request, or manage deep web queries through user-controlled IP address persistence and rotation.
Simply direct your web harvesting traffic through Ion to access the data you need. Ion easily integrates with custom in-house developed scripts, as well as commercial and open source web harvesting platforms.
Who would use Ion? Is it easy to use?
Ion is perfect for online research activities, such as competitive intelligence gatherings, background checks, market analysis, M&A due diligence, malicious content detection and product planning. Ion has also been used by investigators of all kinds, from corporate legal departments investigating fraud and intellectual property infringement to federal law enforcement agencies conducting criminal investigations.
Ion web harvesting solutions easily integrate with most commercial and source web scraping software, dispersing queries across thousands of anonymous IP addresses to prevent blocking and throttling.
How is Ion different from Tor?
When using Tor, your traffic makes several hops around the globe before egressing, limiting your throughput to match the weakest link in the chain. This makes requests notoriously slow and not conducive to automated pulls of large amounts of online data.
All Ion infrastructure is controlled and administered, providing a reliable system for protecting your online privacy. With Tor, you have no visibility to who is operating the exit point of your traffic. Nefarious exit node operators have used Tor to steal intellectual property, usernames and passwords, and establish and control bot networks. They have also been known to hack and deface websites. Furthermore, websites frequently block requests originating from a Tor node.
Differentiating from a Tor node is simple, because the IP addresses of Tor nodes can be obtained using a query to Tor’s directory servers. Five percent of all Tor routers transport half of all traffic, giving those operators disproportionate access to your data.
Why is online privacy such an issue? I’m not doing anything illegal.
Your corporate or organizational IP address is like a digital fingerprint. This information is left on every website you visit during your online activities. Your IP address, browser fingerprint, and other digital attributes not only expose your corporate identity, but also your browsing patterns, company’s intentions and intellectual property. This information can be used to block your access to critical information or redirect you to false information.
Online privacy is crucial for any business or government agency. Privacy invasion can result in monetary loss or reputation damage, and can severely impair your ability to access the essential data you need to make critical business decisions.
When should I mask my IP address?
Whenever anonymity is crucial, your IP address should be masked using Ion’s attribution control solution. Below are a few specific examples of when IP address control is useful:
Competitive Intelligence—If you are identified as a competitor during web scraping efforts, you may be served intentionally inaccurate pricing data designed to mislead you and throw off your data collection.
Investment Intelligence—Prevent your investment research from revealing your intentions before you are ready to act.
Reputation Management—Eliminate exposure of your corporate affiliation so you can conduct unbiased sentiment analysis.
Research—Collect bulk data using multiple, simultaneous requests that do not appear to originate from a single source.
Web Monitoring—Monitor application behavior, verify ads and test your user experience from the point of view of a typical user, not that of your known identity.
There are other products that hide IP addresses or claim to provide online privacy. What makes Ion by Anonymizer different?
Many IP address masking solutions are very basic and have minimal experience providing solutions tailored to exclusively meet the needs of a business. VPN services merely replace your IP address with another, and typically rotate or change your IP address only once per day. This may be sufficient to maintain anonymity for an individual consumer casually browsing the web, but it does not scale for high speed or high volume use. The Ion force multiplier advantage lets you make thousands of concurrent requests each from a different IP address.
Other proxy providers offer little to no control over the IP address used. They may rotate through a pool of IP addresses per request, but do not allow the control of maintaining a session using the same IP address for multiple requests. These sessions enable deeper drilling on websites that require a login or that expect a typical navigation sequence. Ion allows you to maintain an unlimited number of sessions that preserve their IP address to retrieve data.
Proxy providers may also emphasize their use of residential IP addresses as a means of appearing as a normal user. Some actually route your traffic through devices in the homes of their subscribers where you are subjected to the speed and reliability limitations of a person’s home internet connection. Unlike these providers, Ion uses a vast pool of high quality, anonymous IP addresses granting both speed and reliability.
They may also charge you for the number of IP addresses you use, the data you transmit, or the number of HTTP requests made. With Ion, you choose a bandwidth plan that best fits your speed needs. Ion’s bandwidth billing and automatic throttling frees you from tracking usage and worrying about overage charges.
We offer a proven online privacy solution that is uniquely protected under US patent numbers 8,375,434 and 8,332,626 and Australian invention patent no. 2005321876.