The Crumbs You Leave Behind

By DAN MITCHELL

THE Justice Department may not prevail in its effort to force Google to hand over its raw search data to help the government solve the mystery of how people find pornography on the Internet. But the issue has raised the surfing public's awareness, and in the last couple of weeks, the idea has widely circulated that on the Internet, there really is no privacy. Even if the government does not find out what you do online, lots of other people may.

But there are measures that Net users can take to protect themselves. Wired News (Wired.com) offers a FAQ, "How to Foil Search Engine Snoops," that declares the first priority of the privacy-minded should be cookie management. Cookies are pieces of software that many Web sites load onto your computer. They are used to save passwords and other data, and can also be used to track where you go and what you do online. Unless you sign up for something on the site using your real name, it is unlikely that anyone would tie your Internet activity to your identity, but it is possible.