The US justive dept's demand for data on how web surfers use Google and other search engines raises a disturbing question: Just how much do the web sites you visit know about you? In general, they know a great deal about the aggregate behavior of visitors, and nothing about individuals unless they have chosen to identify themselves. But there are exceptions.

Operations of even the most modest web sites can learn a lot about visitors, short of pinpointing their actual identities. At Cylive, we can tell the order in which visitors viewed pages, what websites they came from, and what search terms they used among other things. The information is valuable in designing effective websites. Cylive allows anyone to surf the content Cylivers continue to create. Registration is not required. The only identifying information we could gather from the visitors is 12 digit internet address which provides no clue to the individual identity and somewhat inaccurate information about their geographical location such as country and in some cases, state and region.

The situation is somewhat different when you register at the site. Registered user's activity is linked to their identifying information and profile. Stored data such as account details, profile information and the content (owned/shared) together with the user's activity can drive logic to present targeted advertising that the user is most likely to be interested in. The extent to to which Cylive uses the data collected is limited by Cylive's privacy policy which federal trade commission enforces Cylive to honor. If you live in Euorpean union, stronger privacy directives gives you much stronger legal protections than you get as a US resident.

If privacy is most important content of your internet experience, you should know some facts about latest researches in this space. For example, 87% of US population can be uniquely identified via only a date of birth, sex and five digit zip code. Latest technologies being developed may be able to identify you only by your tastes in books, movies and sports and revealed in your web browsing. Government inquisitiveness is a much more immediate risk to privacy. Justive department can ask for all the internet address from where visitor arrived at a particular site, their account details (if available). Music industry is already using techniques to identify users of illegal download services. There is not a whole lot you can do to prevent this data from being collected. You can use an anonymous proxy service, such as anonymizer, but it can interfere with your use of the web and cannnot guarantee to hide your identifiy in all circumstances. Or, you can live with the fact that what you do on the web cannot be regarded as private.