I have the power to cloud men's minds.

In radio days, devouring Lamont Cranston's adventures as the Shadow, I lusted after the secret mantle of invisibility. Little did I know that it would be the Internet that would make this ineffable power necessary, and that I would wrest it from the Internet itself. Neither new nor secret, this power bubbled up from the primal ooze in the ancient days of Internet time -- 1997. I will indoctrinate you into the cult.

The World Wide Web hosts an unwelcome spider: a potential for considerable compromise of your privacy. Many web sites want to know your name, age, snail-mail/e-mail address, interests, income, what other sites you visit. For starters.

You may not care if the Crummy Cookie Company or WackyWeb Bookstore collects such info from you for marketing purposes. But what if you visit sites that betray your interest in, for example, treatments for a particular disease? What if that information is collated so as to identify you, and passed on, purposely or inadvertently, to employers, insurance companies, governments or other snoops who might use it in ways you would rather they didn't?

Like the banker on the Maryland health commission who used state computers to match cancer patients to bank customers, and canceled their loans. (Time, Aug. 25, 1997)

Surfing generally reveals largely insignificant information about you: your ISP, the number assigned to you (which changes on every call), which browser and operating system you use. To get the goods on you, many web sites induce you to register in order to enter or fully utilize their pages. Registration information, if combined with the other details, may enable tracking of your web activities. Many sites place "cookies" on your drive, which are returned to the sites on future visits.

You needn't, of course, enter personal info if you don't wish to, and you can turn cookies off in your browser. But this may keep you from some interesting sites. The New York Times, for example, won't permit access unless you accept their cookie. Many vendors use cookies as the basis of their online purchase systems.

Perhaps the biggest Internet annoyance is junk e-mail, known as "spam." Software developers, Internet pundits and legislators struggle to discover methods of defeating spam. Lucent's Personalized Web Assistant can make you invisible to most would-be privacy invaders and subvert spammers who don't already have your address.

LPWA is free. You needn't download any software. It asks no questions beyond your real e-mail address and password. Merely edit your browser preferences with the simple instructions at www.lpwa.com, and login for each browsing session. Then for each new web site registration enter your username, password and e-mail address as a backslash followed by "u," "p" and "@" respectively. LPWA translates these into random letters/numbers, consistent for each login at each site, but different for different sites.

If a site e-mails you, LPWA forwards it to you anonymously.

Even if you care naught about anonymity, you'll save energy: you type only two keystrokes per login line, and you needn't remember passwords/usernames. Widely used, LPWA's target-revokable e-mail addresses could castrate spam. Combine LPWA with general anonymizers (www.anonymizer.com; www.cyberarmy.com) and you're all but invisible.

Don't surf naked. Cloak yourself in translucency.

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