There's no point in learning how to read if there are no books or newspapers.

It didn't much matter when, two thousand years ago, the printing press was invented in China, because ordinary people had no access to it. The world changed when a German tinkerer, Johann Gutenberg, created movable type in the 15th century and made it available. For the 1st time ordinary people had the opportunity, once they became literate, to share information.

It didn't much matter when the U.S. government sponsored the creation of the Internet, because ordinary people had no access to it. The world changed when Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web and set it free. An example of the power he gave us is www.booktv.org, CSPAN2's website for its author interviews.

I often miss the interviews that most interest me. But the web empowers me to see them anytime within two months, archived on CSPAN2's site. Berners-Lee's interview remains there as of this writing and I recommend it highly. Enter his name in the search box and click "watch" when the listing appears.

Berners-Lee stresses the importance of privacy. Our personal data is increasingly subject to capture by websites via many mechanisms, from cookies to registration forms to "moles."

Entire industries, called "data mining," "knowledge management" and "customer relationship management," are growing to take advantage of this data. You've probably seen the IBM commercials with the theme, "Getting to know you, getting to know all about you."

There's nothing wrong with businesses getting to know their customers better. We like to deal with places like Cheers, "where everybody knows your name."

The problem arises when not only the bartenders and customers recognize you when you walk through the swinging doors, but when the establishment provides its customers' names and drinking habits to folks we would prefer not have that information.

Like employers, spouses, children, nosey neighbors, government agencies and ubiquitous snoops.

Unfortunately, I haven't found any one tool that does everything that needs to be done to protect personal data both while online and offline.

SwankSoft Technologies makes one of the best footprint foilers: HistoryKill 99 (HK). It not only clears cookies, cache and history files, it achieves what no other program I've found does: it clears the drop-down URLs (uniform resource locators) from Netscape and Internet Explorer.

HK also clears histories from your Documents and Run menus, so passing snoops won't be able to satisfy their curiosity about what you've been writing or working on.

Best of all, once you've configured its settings to take the actions you desire, it does all this with a click or two. HK can be set to activate on startup, automatically clearing any footprints left from the previous session.

Unfortunately, it won't then keep clearing your tracks automatically while browsing, and doesn't include a scheduler. That may be just as well, because while working on the web it is often advantageous to have those history files and URL lists available, as they save a lot of typing when you're revisiting sites.

Just keep HK open on your desktop and click "kill" after closing your browser.

Download a 21-day trial from www.swanksoft.com ($19.95 to purchase).

Kill your Internet history, protect your privacy.

Privacy is security.

Security is power.

Power to the people.

• Contents

• Links

• Home