As fishy as it sounds, it’s perfectly legal for Web site owners to collect data about you and sell it to other companies. When you shop online, the seller may be earning twice from you: once on your purchase, and again by selling information about you to other companies. They can sell your name, address, and data on what sites you visit and what you buy. The other companies use the information to market their own products, resulting in more junk mail, spam, and telemarketing calls for you. And we don’t know anyone who wants more of them.

Selling information about people is not new and not limited to the Internet: catalog companies sell your information to other catalog companies, and even charities sell mailing lists to other charities. The added twist on the Internet is that companies can trace not only what you buy from them, but also what other things you’re interested in, based on the sites you visit.

How can you protect your privacy?

Look for a privacy policy on any site that asks for information about you. Whether you’re shopping, filling in a free registration form, registering a product, or entering a contest you may be asked for information that can be sold. A privacy policy should tell you what information is being gathered about you, how the information will be used, and whether you can choose how the information will be used.

Avoid "cookies." Cookies are small files that a site puts on your hard drive to monitor where you go and what you do. You can set up your navigator to accept all cookies, refuse all cookies, or notify you when a cookie will be deposited then allow you to accept or reject it.

• In Netscape Navigator, choose Edit, Preferences, Advanced. Then select an option from the cookies menu.
• In Microsoft Internet Explorer, choose View, Internet Options, Advanced. Then select an option from cookies in the pull-down menu.

If you want to visit a site anonymously, use the anonymizer. Go to www.anonymizer.com and type in on that site the URL of the site you’d like to visit.

Remember: If you are surfing while at work or in any other situation where you’re on a network or working through a firewall, your employer or other network owner can also trace where you’ve been on the Internet and how much time you spent there. If you don’t want your boss to know you went to a site, don’t go there at work.

Use passwords wisely.

• If you use a password to log on to your computer or a network, don’t use that password for online orders. Also, if you have any particularly sensitive passwords – for a banking site, for example, use those passwords for only that one function.
• Create passwords that are hard to guess. Don’t use your name, address, birth date, phone number, or recognizable words. Numbers and punctuation marks help make a password difficult to guess. One way to create a password that is easy to remember but hard to guess is to take the first letter of each word in a sentence, movie, or song title and add a number to it. The movie, The Road to El Dorado, for example, could become TRTED75. Or try Snow White and the Seven Dwarves: SWANT7D.
• If you have a hard time remembering passwords or keeping them straight, you might have to write them down. Don’t:

• Keep passwords near your computer
• Keep all your passwords in one place
• List the password and the site or function it belongs to in the same place