Whether use the Internet in your work or from home, sitting comfortably in your armchair, travelling in the vast Internet world, probably gives you an impression of freedom. You feel you are free to go anywhere on the network with the feeling of browsing in absolute anonymity. This perception is reinforced by the lack of any visible intermediary. Misunderstanding how networks function can lead to the false - conviction that the connections leave no trace. We see the Internet as complex and so we think that finding those traces would be too cumbersome and time consuming for anyone to feel it was worthwhile.
Reality is otherwise.
Anonymity is not the rule on Internet and the lack of traces even less so. If we refrain from, describing the Internet as virtual or as cyber, to consider it from a technical viewpoint, we can see that the Internet works just like any other communication system where anonymity requires effort, is rarely absolute or guaranteed. Surveillance can be costly but it is not unavoidable and is always possible. The best way to clarify this is to show people connected to the CNIL site what traces of their Internet connections can be established. What the CNIL site enables you to do, with limited technical means, can be done by all the sites you usually visit.