-- Modified on 1/31/2014 1:39:08 PM

There are lots of them:

Read the service agremeent for your broadband; there's a good chance that it says that they reserve the right to collect browsing information. Most modern routers are full-fledged 32-bit computers that run Linux or similar, so anything that a web-server or phone can collect, they can too. This came up a while back: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/13/dlink_routers_have_admin_backdoor/  I seem to recall others.

Anything that gives out your home IP address identifies you, since the ISP knows your credit card info and address. There are ways around that: you can use a proxy, and there are both free and commercial ones. I haven't done much with that, but if it's in the right juristiction it may be hard for anyone to force the operator to hand over your info. Some may not keep IP logs, but that's as hard for you to verify as agency claims about destroying all of your info.

You can also use a system like Tor, which bounces your traffic all over the world to make it hard to figure out who visited what page. There's even an Linux-based operating system called Tails that boots off of a CD or USB stick and gives you a special version of Firefox pre-configured to use Tor. (There are others also, and I have no opinion on which is best.) The advantage to that is that it's easy to keep your personal and hobby browsing separate when they're not on the same OS. I know that early versions didn't mask the traffic through your router (so the above problem applied), but they may have fixed that. It's pretty easy to use, and has an option to add an encrypted volume for your hobby-related files (much like Truecrypt, which I know some guys use). Gmail doesn't like Tor, and some other sites are equally fussy. Hushmail works fine.

Even then, you can still be identified by what's called the MAC address of your computer. That could be connected to you if you used the same machine to read your regular email, or if the manufacturer kept a list of MAC addressed and who bought which machines. One way around that is to buy a computer on Craigslist. Use a throw-away e-mail or phone to contact the seller, and pay cash. I heard one guy say that he liked to get used iPads that way and do his hobby e-mail from coffee shops. The MAC can also be spoofed, and some Tor related projects are working to do that automatically.

When I got my first hobby phone, I thought of the fact that my regular phone and hobby phone would switch between cell towers along the same route, meaning that someone with access to computers at whatever carrier[s] I happen to use could connect the dots and figure out that they're owned by the same person. It seemed paranoid at the time, but according to Snowden & Co., metadata collecton does in fact do that. They also flag anyone who turns on a phone only briefly, and look for any other phone turned off at the same time. The only way to avoid being flagged might be to leave your regular phone at home - and on - and take only your hobby phone. You would have to turn your hobby phone on only when you're not near your house. That would make it a pain if your car breaks down, or if you had to call in an identifiable way for some other reason. Also, if you're driving, lots of juristictions have plate-readers mounted in their squad cars, so they may have a record of what cars were in the areas that your phone traveled through. Private security cameras may catch that also, but that data isn't as likely to be in a database that can be easily connected to others and searched.

Browsing habits can be unique, too. I thought about my normal choice of search engines, mapping software, and e-mail service, and it was actually pretty identifiable. It probably wouldn't be as much of an issue for someone who normally uses gmail, google, and google maps, but whatever you use will show up in browser cookes and referrer information that's passed to destination sites when you click a link.

I just looked at what I wrote, and I'm sure that a lot of people will be thinking "What did you DO? Nobody would go to that trouble to track down the random punter." That's actually the moral of the story: This isn't the 90's. The data is all online and searchable. Twenty years ago that type of data analysis would have meant having an investigator drive around asking random store managers for their security-camera tapes, then watching them one-by-one; now it's so easy to get your hands on police plate-reader data that private recovery services use it to track down stolen cars. Lots of major websites already have agreements by which they hand over data piles to the Fed, so there's no labor involved. Police departments could afford to use this to nail 15-year-olds breaking curfew.

There's a lot of other stuff to watch out for. Maybe someone should condense it into a neat list with links to counter-measures. I'm only sort of aware of this stuff, so I'd still need to do quite a bit of reading.

-- Modified on 1/31/2014 7:14:24 PM

While I still do have a Google voice line, I have been phasing out my gmail addresses and replacing them.    I also no longer use Google's browser unless I am on a VPN or accessing Google through a private browser.  

Try DuckDuckGo or IxQuick as your browsers as they do not track, nor do they record your IP addy. You could also use hidemyass to access Google without them tracking you. That doesn't prevent the websites that you are visiting from recording or seeing your IP address while you are visiting them unless you are on a VPN or TOR