Protecting Yourself Online, The Internet tracks everything.

The importance of online privacy is not only about keeping personal information safe, it’s also about keeping your personal location, from prying eyes. It’s also about keeping you identity safe. Identity theft is one of the increasing problems with internet use. So what can you do.

1. Cookie Management, Cleaning Expired Cookies.

A cookie is information left on your machine from websites you visit, this information is not always harmful, but contains some information about your visit, this information can be cleaned up by finding the remove cookies option in each browser type, or you can try using a shareware tool like www.ccleaner.com which has built in support for most browser configurations, like Google Chrome, IE, FireFox, Optra and Safari as well as some Windows Locations that store your browsers surfing history.

2. Use a Browser with a built in Privacy Mode

A feature showing up in new Browser versions is a Privacy Mode, or incognito.
This mode makes sure that your browser doesn’t record any information or store any cookies on your machine, and removes anything in use after the termination of the browser process.

3. Make a DUMMY Email Address

Keep a dummy e-mail account for signing up to ANYTHING on the internet, that isn’t a brick a motor company. It’s suggested that giving out you email address to anyone that you don’t trust, is a bad idea. Creating a Hotmail account or a Gmail account for this will save your primary email address a lot of spam, and keep you’re mailbox identity safe.

4. Hide you’re IP address.

You can do this a couple of ways. Now you can jump to any site using a free proxy server, which can be done by configuring a Proxy in your browser config. Or by using a site like www.hidemyass.com, or you can install a VPN program like http://www.hotspotshield.com that will automatically switch your IP address through the VPN.

The issue with these FREE services is that they come with banner ads.

Pay for a VPN service with an anonymous credit card (Visa Cash Card), and you’ll be banner free.