IP addresses are not only recorded when visiting a web site. Participating in chat rooms, sending email, posting messages on discussion boards, playing online games, and using mail servers are all activities that reveal a person's IP address to a discerning individual or a system administrator. Even a nonchalant email reader can divine the true origins of an email by simply taking a look at the email's header, which includes the originating computer's IP address. Contrary to what online email providers will tell you, web-based email services like Yahoo and Hotmail do not shield a person's IP address from wandering eyes.

Given the trail of activity an IP address provides for any cyber-sleuth perceptive enough to deduce it, Internet surfers concerned with their privacy should pursue masking their IP address from unwanted eyes. Several companies have recognized the market emerging for Internet security and have created products to fit this space. One such company, Anonymizer.com, provides subscribers to its web site the option of private Internet surfing. Users of Anonymizer.com's privacy service sign in at Anonymizer's web site before perusing other web sites or sending web-based email. Logging in at Anonymizer's site masks an Internet surfer's IP address, making it next to impossible for IP address snoops to reverse engineer a web-surfer's IP address. Anonymizer's service costs $29.95 a year, but potential users can try the service for free before committing to a subscription.

An IP address is not the only traceable footprint web-surfers leave behind them as they trail blaze through the Internet. Cookies, small text files web sites place on a computer's hard drive when that computer is interacting with the site, pose as much of a privacy threat as traceable IP addresses. Cookies, once placed on a computer's hard drive, facilitate easier use of the web site. Cookies often store personal information, preferences, login IDs, and passwords, providing web-surfers with the convenience of not having to reenter data every time they visit a web site. Cookies also help web site developers identify users to their sites and many sites that require users to log in require those users to also enable cookies on their browsers.

But while cookies provide Internet users with a good dose of convenience, they can also cause web-surfers no end of consternation. Data-miners often place cookies on an unsuspecting user's computer that can be programmed to keep a log of Internet activities. This log follows web-surfers from site to site, amassing a wealth of information about a specific individual's Internet habits, buying preferences, hobbies, entertainment interests, and fiscal concerns. This information is then sold to advertisers and mass-marketers, who then review an individual's interests and habits, create a marketing profile, and proceed to bombard the unwary Internet user with a gratuitous inundation of advertisements. Cookies left unchecked can potentially transform a casual jaunt around cyberspace into a ball and chain of advertisements, unsolicited email, and popup windows that hound Internet users incessantly.

Although wayward cookies can be considered the zealous frontline troops of online marketers, they can be contained using a combination of common sense and software developed specifically for eliminating renegade cookies from computer hard drives. One method for monitoring the invasiveness of data-miner's cookies is simply to manually monitor cookies as they are placed on a computer hard drive, using common sense to remove those cookies which are not necessary for viewing web sites an Internet user may visit on a regular basis. Newer versions of such browsers as Microsoft Explorer and Netscape Communicator have updated privacy tools which can be used to screen incoming cookies before they are placed on a computer.