This is a guest post by Bill Rounds.

You are online every day, probably for several hours for fun or work. But the online universe is not always status updates and YouTubes of funny cats. There are some grown up things to consider. One is how much information you are broadcasting to the world while using the interwebs. Fortunately, manning or womaning up is neither hard nor expensive and can sometimes be free. Here are the top three things you could be doing to take control of and protect your online privacy.

1. Don’t Let Search Engines Look Over Your Shoulder

First, almost all of the search engines keep track of who looks for what. They use your IP address to identify you and have a record of all of your searches. Keeping track of that data might help them provide a better service, but it might seem kind of creepy that someone knows so much about you. They probably know you better than you know yourself.

There is a very simple remedy. There are websites that will do the searching for you, instantaneously. You still get the same great results, but the search engines think that someone else is doing the searching, not you. The best sites will only keep a record of your searches for a few hours, rather than months, years, and potentially indefinitely. So next time you are searching using the term “how to treat a really itchy rash” (for a friend, of course), go ahead and do that search through one of those websites. Some good free search engines, one has been mentioned before on this site, are:

Scroogle
Startingpage (by Ixquick)

2. Taking it One Step Further…Now Your ISP Can’t See You Either

Second, the search engines are not the only ones keeping track. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) might be your digital shadow. They might not see what you are typing into a search engine, but they see where that search takes you. ISP’s keep records of all the websites you visit. A lot of websites (usually the ones run by giant mega corporations), are collecting (and sometimes selling) the information they gather about you, their visitor.

So what can you do? Proxy servers allow you to connect to another computer and let that computer do the surfing for you. If you use a truly anonymous proxy, your online activity is difficult to track. Your ISP only knows that you visited the IP address of the proxy server. It cannot see any of the sites you visit after that. Plus, the websites you visit can see only the ISP of the proxy, not your own. That is like two for the price of one, which is nothing. Here a few good free proxies:

Tor
Proxify
Anonymouse

3. The Grand Daddy Of Online Privacy…Virtual Private Networks

Third, if you are anything like me, sometimes you take your laptop out of your house. And every once in a while, you log onto the Internet from a coffee shop, cafe, or some other public WiFi hotspot. You might not know how easy it is for someone to pick up that signal and snoop on everything you are doing on that connection. There are free snooping programs which are about as difficult as Mozilla Firefox to download and operate. And oh yes, they can be doing it from up to a mile away.

The best way to prevent that kind of snooping is to set up a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Like a proxy server, a VPN lets you create an encrypted tunnel between your computer and some other network somewhere. When you do that, you protect your internet activity from those WiFi hotspot snoopers. You can set up a VPN to your own home router, to a work computer, or to some other computer. Set up can be tricky so if you do not know how to do it you will want to check out some YouTubes or get a friend from the IT department to help you. If you are using a third party VPN, which may have a fee, then you have the added benefit of protecting your online privacy usually with a lot less hassle. Here are some VPN recommendations:

Free: Set one up yourself to your home router or other computer
Paid: Witopia, Anonymizer, Identity Cloaker

Conclusion

If you use the Internet then you may be revealing more information to more parties than you realize. To take more control over that information you can use the triple defense of anonymous web searches, anonymous proxies and VPNs. Now like any great superhero, Spiderman, Batman, etc. who keeps their identity private; go and use your powers for good!

About the author: Bill Rounds is a California Attorney. He runs HowToVanish.com where he shows people how to control how much of their personal, private information is available to the public.

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