Privacy. People say they cherish it, but they give it away without a thought online. Here are some sites for raising privacy awareness, and for rebuilding lost privacy in your online travels.
Here is a "how-to" for online privacy. Some things to consider: Don't give away personal info just to enter dumb contests. Use encryption. And don't take cookies from strangers.
This Web site can tell you what personal information your computer may be making available at sites you visit, or to hackers. One example that gave us pause: The service could see the last thing we had pasted into the Windows clipboard. Anonymizer is a subscription service, but also has free versions of software to hide some of your online activities from advertisers and other snoops.
www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer.html
Operated by several groups dedicated to privacy and free speech, this site allows anyone to send untraceable e-mail. It works by bouncing messages through a series of computers, each of which forwards the e-mail without return information. What's this for? Hard to say. It's certainly no way to begin a correspondence, unless you put a return e-mail address in the body of your anonymous message. But then you're not anonymous anymore.
www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/kidzprivacy
A federal law meant to protect children's privacy on the Internet the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act is explained for families on this Web site of the Federal Trade Commission. The law prohibits Web sites from taking personal information from youngsters without a parent's consent. The advice here for children don't reveal passwords, for example is healthy for adults, too.
Maybe that free software you downloaded is also "spyware" designed to inform its masters and their advertisers about your online proclivities, shopping habits and haunts. The SpyChecker site has a database of such programs, and tools for disabling and deleting them.
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