Did this article help you? Donate via PayPal to say thanks..

How To Turn Off Anonymous Browsing in ZoneAlarm Pro

Zone Labs personal firewall software, ZoneAlarm Pro, has a feature that turns off the referrer information in your browser. Normally, when you visit a web page your browser also sends the information about what link you followed to get to that page. One of the privacy features of ZoneAlarm blocks that information

While you may think this is a good thing (it helps hide information that those intrusive websites might be gathering about you) it may also interfere with the workings of some forms and scripts on websites. If a form or script isn't working for you, and you use ZoneAlarm Pro 4, you can turn off the referral blocking. You only have to change one setting, however it isn't easy at all to find where they have hidden that setting.

First, open up the ZoneAlarm Control Center, and go to the Privacy tab. (That much makes sense.) Once there, you need to click on the Custom button in the Cookie Control section.

This brings up a dialog called Custom Privacy Settings, open to the Cookies tab. (In the previous window, you could have clicked one of the other two Custom buttons to also bring up this dialog, only you would be on one of the other tabs.) Then in the 3rd Party Cookies section, make sure the option "Remove Private Header information" is NOT selected.

Click the Apply button before you leave, and then click OK to leave this dialog. You can shut down the ZoneAlarm control center after that, and your changes will be saved.

After doing this, the problems I was having with scripts at a number of different web sites stopped. The web hosting company that I use for this site (and others), ICG-Link, has information on how to turn off this same feature if you are using Norton Internet Security.