How far do you go to protect your anonymity and privacy? Here are a few tips that you can apply to your everyday life to protect yourself and help build a private anonymous lifestyle. Please submit any tips to us and any additional information privacy advocates would better educate from to us.

Why is Privacy Important?
Privacy and anonymous speech are at the core of a free society. Individuals must have the right to travel where they want, read what they want, buy what they want, and speak to whomever they please. The snooper could be an ex-wife, a company doing market research, an employer trying to get rid of "bad" employees, your government making sure you don't dissent, or even a foreign government looking for people to rebel. In any case, the ability to criticize someone or something without fear of reprisal is very important. For example, a member of a socially conservative family may be reluctant to read a book that examines the nature of homosexuality if he or she knew they could be exposed for doing so. Similarly, a government employee may be hesitant to expose the corrupt practices of his or her superior, fearing retaliation in the face of uncertain anonymity.

Essentially, let's put it this way - if I'm critical of the government in my own home and I don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, I certainly have a discentive from expressing my ideas to others. The history of America has shown what happens when the wrong people get into power and start persecuting those with beliefs they don't like - look at McCarthy's Committee on un-American Affairs. If that isn't a sound justification for privacy from snooping government officials and the danger of overzealous bureaucrats trying to make a name for themselves, I don't know what is.

Privacy and anonymous speech are at the core of a free state. Even the Federalist Papers written by the founding fathers of the United States were published under pseudonyms. If England had been able to find out who was criticizing their rule, they would have silenced them and the US may have never been born.