All it took was the announcement of a new online service, which invariably meant filling out a form with personal information, and people were quick to sign on. Now the trend is in the other direction, as in the flap over Facebook.

The social networking site has set up a news "feed" that tracks changes to any of its users' profiles; these news items can be automatically delivered to friends on the service. But instead of winning the plaudits of members, Facebook found itself dealing with a revolt, a privacy backlash that forced it to revamp its new offerings and give people greater control over what is published about them.

The odd disconnect here is that the information in these personal news feeds is already available to Facebook users. What changed was the addition of a new delivery method, and the sense that hunting news about friends had become automated.

Evidently we like the ability to find things out, but we want to feel that we're in charge of the search. And we're getting queasy about being searched for ourselves.

The recent AOL security breach points to the same conclusion.

People have been using AOL, Google and other engines that collected their search queries for a long time. But until AOL's database was inadvertently released, it's safe to say that most didn't realize how a string of search queries might be a little too precise, identifying quirky personal details and in some cases individuals.

Search companies should consider what they can do to enhance privacy, one possibility being to stop saving search queries in the first place.

An engine that does this is Ixquick (www.ixquick.com), a Dutch operation that makes a point about protecting its users. The company announced in June that it would delete all personal details gathered from its log files. No more tracking queries, sites visited or, for that matter, the IP addresses of searchers. Ixquick is a "meta" search engine it runs searches using 11 other engines and combines their results, but without sharing any user data with them.

Ixquick should be applauded for its privacy decision, but those who want to continue searching directly with Google or other big engines have other options as well. A proxy, for example, can bring anonymity to the Web experience; proxies do this by setting themselves up between you and the sites you connect to. Any Web server you're dealing with assumes you are connecting from the proxy computer rather than through your real address.

Two free proxies are Anonymouse (anonymouse.org) and Black Box Search (www.blackboxsearch.com), both of which let you roam the Web while concealing your personal information. You can search Google, for example, through Black Box Search and know that your IP address is secure and that no tracking cookies are being left on your machine. Anonymouse offers ad-supported use or a faster, ad-free subscription plan.

A commercial option is Anonymous Surfing, a subscription service that hides your IP address by redirecting your browsing through its own secure servers (www.anonymizer.com). Usefully, a free trial is available.

One added aspect that Anonymizer brings to the security game is an anti-phishing technology that updates every fifteen minutes. If you try to connect to a site that is running a phishing scam by mining personal identity information, the software will display a warning page about the site.

We're all going to become more knowledgeable about privacy concerns as people begin to realize how much data is being gathered about them. Recently we learned that Second Life, a San Francisco-based "virtual world" company, has been attacked by hackers, compromising user identities and credit card information. So the problem isn't just companies mining data for marketing; it's also a matter of keeping your data out of databases in the first place.

And if you find security concerns alarming, consider doing something about cookies, the nuggets of data that help search companies cluster your search queries together. You can clean them out on a regular basis via your browser menu, but it may be better to do the cleaning selectively, because many cookies are helpful in customizing your Web use at sites you frequent.

To pick and choose, try a cookie manager. Anonymizer's Digital Shredder Lite, available free with the Anonymous Surfing package, is one way to proceed. Another is Guidescope (www.guidescope.com), free for home use.

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