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I just try to do the simple obvious solutions.

Most sites “track” you - certainly the popular search tools.

“How” do they track you ?

Most leave “cookies” “in your browser” - meaning, your browser puts them in local files on your PC.

The next time you go to the same website it will look for cookies stored by your browser.

This is the obvious thing you can mitigate. You can set configure your browser to not accept cookies - except on a case by case basis. So YOU tell your browser which sites you want to save cookies for, and the rest will be rejected.

A few websites, LOL, do not display correctly, but when I see a “blank” page, if I really want to see the site, I allow cookies for it, look at it, when I’m done, I disallow cookies for it again.

You can also tell your browser you ONLY want to keep the cookies for the SESSION - that is, until you close all your browser windows. That is my default for allowing cookies - session only. The only site I allow permanent cookies for - biblegateway, so it can remember my defaults for searching the Bible.

This way, any time you log in to any website where you have a login, such as where you buy things, log in to FR, etc.... the cookies they leave will be wiped clean when you close your browser.

Adobe flash has it’s own kind of “cookies” that it allows websites to save:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_shared_object

I use a Firefox plugin, BetterPrivacy, to wipe those things clean. If you don’t clean out those “flash cookies”, MANY websites save them and a HUGE amount of data about what you’ve been doing on the web will be saved on your computer.

The real danger, of course, is malicious websites and any malicious software that you inadvertantly install on your computer looking at OTHER website’s cookies and flash cookies, even though they didn’t leave the cookies there.

If they’re serious, the webserver hosting the website you are looking at knows your IP address. It has to in order to communicate with you !

So a webserver can keep its own log on the webserver of everything everyone does on their site - and include the browser IP address in the log. Since it’s the webserver (the website) writing to its own files - there’s no way for a website visitor to control this.

This is why some people use an “anonymizer” - it provides a different IP address to webservers than your own. Of course, the anonymizing service knows your real IP address. So, if NSA, etc., wanted to know a lot of these IPs, all they’d technically have to do is establish a front company that runs an anonymizer service. Or, even more simply, just go to an anonymizer company with a court order to turn over data to them.