Software that snitches
Another threat to your Internet privacy is software that literally spies on your system from within, feeding the information to an outside observer. Some viruses, Trojan horses, and worm programs do this. PrettyPark, a Trojan horse program that propagates itself via e-mail, is designed to seek out sensitive data within your system and transmit it to the program's creator via IRC (Internet Relay Chat).
Even legitimate applications can gather or reveal personal information about you under certain circumstances. For example, mIRC, a popular IRC client, implements the identd (Identification Daemon) protocol, which allows any system on the Internet to ask your computer who you are. Many ISP systems likewise implement identidy.
Late last year, news came out that the Comet Cursor utility, which changes a Windows system's cursor according to the Web site that it's browsing, was sending information about users' browsing habits to its creator. (The vendor claims that individual browsing habits are not logged, but the fact that the program was doing this at all was unsettling to many.)
Similarly, Netscape's "What's Related" feature sends some information about your Internet browsing back to a Netscape server. (Netscapeââ,¬"now part of AOLââ,¬"claims that it uses the information to compile statistics but not to track individual browsing habits. Privacy-conscious users will want to disable this feature anyway.)
Consumers harshly rebuked Real when they discovered that the company was monitoring what they viewed via the ubiquitous RealPlayer multimedia playback software. (A patch on the company's Web site can disable the snooping.) And Steve Gibson, of Gibson Research, recently discovered that advertising banner software published by Auriate Media(now Radiate) sends information about which banner ads you click, and the amount of time you spend reading them, back to the company.
Anonymous browsing
Because your online privacy is so easy to compromise, entire businesses have been created to offer anonymous browsing capabilities. Our sidebar "Anonymous Browsing Services" describes several such services.
The granddaddy of these is Anonymizer (www.anonymizer.com). Anonymizer runs a proxy server that attempts to hide your identity and filter cookies as you browse. (Unfortunately, as with blocking software, enterprising snoops are constantly striving to find ways around these filters. So at any moment, you can never be 100 percent sure that they're working.) Anonymizer's service costs US$15 per quarter, and its site offers free trials. The free proxy causes a delay, however, and it displays ads at the top of every page.
excelant article
one addtional point:
one way to prevent the reading of email in outlook and outlook express from triggering the html bugs, etc is to
1) download your email
2) disable your internet connection
3) read all your email
4) enable your internet connection