Protecting Your Privacy

Some say that the internet will only thrive if advertising is allowed to flourish; ads are the primary source of income for many sites. Yet some advertisers are employing sneaky tactics and actively snooping on our browsing habits, following our clicktrails with a variety of cookies, "web bugs", and most sinister of all, spyware - software installed silently along with some innocent app that you thought you were getting for free, and which quietly sends an advertising company data about your browsing habits.

FilterGate does a good job of blocking web bugs, and also strips out ads from web pages, speeding up surfing. It also has a pop-up blocker, although I prefer the one you get with the Google Toolbar. If you install a lot of software, especially freeware or shareware, then you may well have also unwittingly installed spyware along with it. Adaware is a free utility that will detect and remove spyware and other malware from your machine. A good indicator of the presence of spyware is a system that has suddenly become sluggish and unstable, so give it a whirl: you may be surprised by what you find.

Because web bugs use cookies to track your clicktrail, you can largely prevent them by changing IE's default cookie handling behaviour; in Tools | Options | Privacy | Advanced... select to always block third party cookies and to prompt for first-party cookies. If a site requests to write a cookie to your machine, you should generally reject it, permanently, unless of course it's a site you trust and use regularly.