From Mike Wendlend
NBC News
The need for online privacy has never been greater, from identity theft scams to continuing out of control problems with spam and hacker attacks, finding ways to surf online and keep your personal information personal can be quite a challenge.
One way to surf the net safely is to do so anonymously, and that's what a program called Anonymizer does.
It basically hides your real identity by encrypting your personal information and masking the IP address of your computer.
The IP address is your computer's unique digital fingerprint, used from online scamsters, snoops, and con artists to track and build profiles of your internet usage.
It also flashes a warning should you stumble across phony sites used by online criminals to trick you into disclosing personal info.
Another site, Spam Gourmet, sets up throw away email addresses for you to use online.
You can use it to limit just how many e-mails you'll get from any one source, thus not letting unscrupulous e-mail harvesters sell your address to spammers.
The address, in effect, shuts down after receiving however many e-mails specified by the user.
Other tools help.
Make sure you have a spam filter on your computer that uses a Bayesian filter, like Spam Sieve for Macs or Spambully for PCs.
Bayesian filtering uses artificial intelligence to identify and block spam.
Finally, if your computer is running slow, you'll need to clear out the adware, junkware, and spyware that accumulates such as Ad Aware and Error Nuker.
