Registering to read news sites such as nytimes.com or washingtonpost.com isn’t just annoying, it’s an invasion of your privacy.

When you register for your “free account” you give them your name and email, and if you’re stupid, your address, phone number, and date of birth, too.

Now the newspaper can track which stories you read. There are two ways this information can be used.

Example #1: Hmmm…. Gramma Smith in Boise sure likes our recipes section. Hey, she even checked out our cabbage and rhubarb cookies recipe three times yesterday. Let’s send her some spam, some junk mail, heck even let’s have telemarketers call her so that our advertiser can sell her seeds for their new genetically-modified rhubard that makes the moistest cookies.

Example #2: Tom Jones in Brooklyn sure seems to be reading a lot about terrorism lately. Maybe he’s a terrorist sympathizer. Worse, maybe he’s one of those long-haired hippie freaks who thinks the government shouldn’t be snooping on its citizens, reading their email, and tapping their phones without a warrant. Better pass this one on to the FBI.

Remeber this data never gets destroyed. Twenty years from now the New York Times is going to know what you’re reading today.

Question: do you trust large, for-profit corporations with personal details about your interests and reading habits? Do you trust the United States government not to subpoena this data with a National Security Letter?

Does registering your identity with the newspapers really seem like such a good idea?

Maybe it’s time to consider using bugmenot.com, where you can get free, anonymous logins to most of the major online newspapers.

If you value your privacy, never log in to one of these news sites again with your real name and email address — grab a free login from bugmenot instead.

Web advertising sucks. Fortunately, there is an easy way for you non-techies to squash most of it: Firefox’s Adblock plug-in. (Geeks may prefer to use privoxy and tor.)

Adblock by default blocks all the main advertising banner sources, like doubleclick.net, etc. Its real functionality, however, lies in your ability to customize it and teach it what are ads and what aren’t, and thereby reduce your online visual clutter.

Suppose you are reading the Guardian online. You see an annoying ad image. So, with Adblock installed, you right-click on the image and select “Adblock Image”.

It will offer you something that looks like this:

http://ads.guardian.co.uk/$%rgkfdGSER%^234rTGRE$%6__SOME_JUNK_HERE

You don’t need to worry about what all that junk at the end means, but you have to get rid of it. The reason is this: Adblock will block only exactly what you tell it to. So if a single digit of that junk is different, it won’t get blocked the second time around.

So what you do is this. Delete all that junk so that the url looks like this:

http://ads.guardian.co.uk/

now add an asterisk (’*') at the end, like so:

http://ads.guardian.co.uk/*

The asterisk (for you non-geeks) means “match any and all junk that follows.” The above test will block everything that comes from ads.guardian.co.uk, thus delivering to you all the bounteous content the Guardian has to offer without the annoying ads or the need to register to see their ad-free site.

Search engines store every search and the corresponding IP address. While they may not know your name, they know every search term you’ve ever entered from the IP address that identifies your home computer.

While it’s not exactly news, this information is very tempting for people who can throw around National Security Letters like candy, and demand search engines turn over their search data.

This is very scary, and is a permanent invasion of your privacy — there is nothing to prevent search engines from saving that data for an infinite period of time, and every reason for them to do so: data mining your personal interests could be very profitable.

Enter Scroogle. Scroogle is a google scraper — hence the name — and acts as a proxy to all your search requests. That means that google only knows that scroogle is making a search request, and not you personally. Plus scroogle deletes all logs within 48 hours, which prevents the search engines from data mining you or the feds from invading and destroying your privacy.

To make things extra easy, there’s now a Firefox plugin (also here) so that you can use Scroogle instead of Google right in your browser window.

There’s no excuse for not protecting your privacy, and if you expect Google or the US government to “just do the right thing” then you’re a fool. Scroogle is a small step in the right direction. Download and install the Firefox plugin and start using it now.

Update: You may have heard that Google are now planning on anonymizing some portions of your search data. After two years. Yippee. Good article here. I draw your attention especially to this quote:

“Google should not be in the spy business. By logging IP addresses and search strings they are running the largest intelligence operation in the world.”

I finally have my bright ‘n’ shiny new Ubuntu Linux desktop all set up, plus a new DSL connection, and with the extra bandwidth and the superior operating system the question of old comes to mind: is it finally time to install and use TOR?

TOR (aka The Onion Router) is the best legal way for an ordinary user to achieve nearly complete anonymity on the net. All your http requests are encrypted and then routed through several random servers (”nodes”) around the world. This makes it impossible for your ISP to know what web pages you are viewing, and, more importantly, prevents the nasty intrusive privacy-loathing US government from knowing what you’re looking at.

(In case you were wondering, the illegal way to get even better anonymity is to buy into a bot-net or steal someone’s identity. But this essay deals with protecting your civil liberties, not engaging in computer-based organized crime.)

So it worth it to use TOR? Well, the only userland problem with TOR is its speed — even on a DSL link things can really growl along at a snail’s pace. And in order for TOR to be truly effective, you need to use it ALL the time — no exceptions, no fits of peak when you turn it off to view a particular website, it needs to be on, always. Which means unless you have a very important secret to keep — maybe you’re a dissident in a repressive regime, like Burma, North Korea, or the United States of America — it may not be worth the extra time you’ll be spending waiting for your web pages to load.

Remember, if you use a web-based email service like fastmail.fm or gmail, every email you send includes the IP address of the computer you sent it from. Unless you use TOR, anyone can look up that IP address and know exactly what chair you were sitting in at the moment you sent that email.

Another thought also comes to mind when pondering TOR. In this age of self-revelatory blogs, myspace, and other venues of the “self-confessional”, I have to wonder if the privacy-ending nature our technology is actually the collective will of our culture, the Destiny of the people of the West.

After all, what’s the point in anonymizing all your web traffic so no one knows where you are, when your blog details your exact movements, such that anyone with half a wit could trace your whereabouts?

That said, TOR is still a beautiful thing. It’s a big fat *pbthh* up the nose of people like George Bush and that fucking spic of an Attorney General who’d rape your grandmother to falsely convict Noam Chomsky of terrorism.

TOR is easy to install and configure, and is available for all major operating systems. Obviously you should know by now that Firefox is the better web browser, and you can install Torbutton, which will allow you to turn TOR off and on easily.

If you value your freedom, then you need to start paying attention to how the technology you use takes that freedom away from you. If you value your privacy — if you don’t want the government, your ISP, and large corporations knowing what you read, who you talk to, and what music you download — then you need to seriously consider downloading and using TOR.