Abine in the news

Granted, Blur can do a lot more, like create prepaid credit card numbers on the fly to keep your banking information secure, store your passwords, create dummy phone numbers, and so on.

Blur is more than just an online password manager, and it offers a range of privacy tools worthy of Abine’s name. For no extra charge, you can protect your credit cards and block cross-site trackers.

Abine Blur takes the concept of masking your actual identity online to the next level. Besides masking your email address, it offers masked credit card numbers, different for each transaction.

According to cybersecurity firm McAfee, over a third of Americans fell to a phishing scheme in the last year. 41 percent of Americans fell victim to email phishing, 35 percent fell victim to text phishing and 30 percent have lost more than $500 to online scams this year.

Abine Blur is an extremely interesting browser extension that offers fantastic cross-device compatibility. Beginners looking for a password manager that auto-fills on the fly can make use of this software for free, and because it doubles as a tracker stopping application - it really offers a lot of benefits to users.

Remember burner phones, the temporary, disposable cell phones that let you hide your identity back in the day? There’s a credit card for that now. Meet Abine Blur, your burner online credit card.

Common wisdom holds that you should never reveal your personal information online. Sometimes, though, you can't avoid it. When you buy the latest drone or smart speaker online, you give the merchant your address for shipping, credit card details for payment, and email address for notifications. But for $39 per year, Abine's Blur service lets you shop and surf in privacy, masking your actual personal details. It also includes a basic password manager. A free edition includes password management, email address masking, and tracker blocking.

When we don't view privacy as a right, it risks becoming a checkbox on a laundry list of features at exorbitant prices. When that happens, the entire industry fails the consumer.

It’s become painfully clear that hotels are not doing enough to protect their guests’ privacy. In recent years, we’ve seen high-volume data breaches at a slew of major hotel brands, including Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, InterContinental, Sheraton, Westin, Starwood, Wyndham, Omni Hotels and Mandarin Oriental.

Whenever there's a huge data breach or other security scare, we ask what can people do to protect themselves. We need to stop asking what the victims can do and put the burden where it belongs: on the companies that allowed the breaches to happen.

For the security freaks who tend to get worried every time they put their emails, cards and contact details on the internet, Blur from Abine is a blessing from up above. With Blur, you can block ads, stop leaving a digital footprint everywhere and above all, prevent data theft.

The moment I started seriously worrying about credit card and debit card skimmers wasn't when my entire bank account was transferred to Turkey, or when I had to replace a credit card three times in two months because of fraudulent charges.

The Blur app generates for you passwords but on top of that, it masks your accounts. It masks your email identity to receive emails privately. It also masks your credit number to prevent fraud. There’s a free version and a paid one. Both these tools help you remain anonymous and let you decide who has access to your private information.

Viruses, Trojans, and other malicious programs attack your OS and your apps. With phishing attacks, the target is you, the user. Here's how to protect your personal information and avoid these scams.

Have you ever had your credit card number stolen or been the victim of identity theft? It can absolutely wreak havoc on your financial life. You may have even considered using a masked credit card for online shopping. But is this really a safe alternative? Let’s remove the “mask” and reveal everything you need to know about masked credit cards.

There's every reason in the world to shop online. The bargains are there. The selection is mind-boggling. The shopping is secure. Shipping is fast. Even returns are easy, with the right e-tailers. Shopping has never been easier or more convenient for consumers.

Personal information is the currency on which much of the internet depends. It's gathered everywhere, often without people's knowledge, and it effectively pays the bills on many free services and apps we take for granted.

Here’s one you may have heard before: You should use a password manager. A good password manager helps create strong passwords, is safer than reusing the same ones and can keep you—blah blah blah. Stick that next to “Go to bed earlier” and “Cookies are bad for you” in the brimming file of good advice you’ll take... later.

It’s amazing when you think about how much of our personal information is online for all to see. There are things online that you might not like. Some of it may even embarrass you. We all have skeletons in our online closet. These may be small things or big things. That might not bother some people, but other’s don’t want their personal info out there at all.

Password managers are quickly becoming a necessary tool for browsing the internet. At Cloudwards.net, we take security and privacy seriously. We’re here today for one reason: to pick from our password manager reviews the best option to secure your online accounts.

Common wisdom holds that you should never reveal your personal information online. Sometimes, though, you can't avoid it. When you buy the latest drone or smart speaker online, you give the merchant your address for shipping, credit card details for payment, and email address for notifications. But for $39 per year, Abine's Blur service lets you shop and surf in privacy, masking your actual personal details. It also includes a basic password manager. A free edition includes password management, email address masking, and tracker blocking.

You may think your internet usage is completely private, but any time you access a website, sign up for an account, purchase a product, post a message, or browse search engine results, you’re sharing something about yourself. If you find this troubling, you may want to learn more about how you can delete your internet footprints.

Any time you visit a website, companies you’ve never heard of use embedded trackers to collect information related to your browsing and purchase history, your interests, and other personal information you input into signup boxes or search engines. Data brokers use the information to categorize consumers and sell the data to outside agencies for marketing purposes. Abine created its Blur and DeleteMe security solutions to not only block the intrusion of trackers, but to create ways for customers to use a masked email address, phone number, and credit card number to hide their real information when making purchases. DeleteMe searches data broker websites for users’ information and permanently removes it from the database.

Rob Shavell, CEO of Abine - A lot of personal data is shockingly available on the dark web and the clearnet, but we almost joke when we hear about the amount of data leaked from breaches like Yahoo....Help us understand the amount of data that is available.

SAN FRANCISCO, California -- Data brokers gather information about you, then sell it to companies and individuals. Right now, your worst enemy could go online and with a few clicks of the keys, gain access to several specialized websites.

Abine has integrated Face ID support into its Blur password manager and autofill app, enabling users to automatically log into various mobile accounts just by looking at their iPhone X devices.

Going about your daily business—shopping online, buying a home, getting married, using a search engine, liking a Facebook page, registering to vote—leaves an enormous paper trail, and data brokers are scooping it up.

Getting off of data broker sites is time-consuming, so load up on snacks, queue up your favorite playlist, and roll up your sleeves. If you have limited time, start with the high-priority sites on this list.

Ever wanted to remove something from the internet? It could be an embarrassing photo, or a newspaper article that wrongly names you in relation to a crime, or an old social media account from middle school. It’s important to think before putting anything on the internet, because it could be on there forever.

Abine, the online privacy company, has integrated Apple's FACE ID API into the privacy-focused Blur password manager and digital wallet. This means free or premium Blur users can auto-fill account logins at any web site simply by looking at their phone.

Get rid of the sticky notes and get peace of mind. Choose a password manager to secure your digital life. Blur is a product that creates instant virtual credit card numbers, manages passwords, provides a dedicated private phone number and more.

You can never completely remove your information from the internet, but you can minimize your online footprint. This article shows you how to accomplish this task in the following areas.

Your information is out there on the internet for all eyes to see. Not just your name and address, but your income, religious affiliation, any criminal or legal action against you - some of the websites even rate your reputation.

Removing that information from the Internet is possible, although hard, and there are some ways to ensure this is done successfully.

A senior developer at Abine, the online privacy company, has won a prize in the ConsenSys uPort contest for Blockchain Identity.

In an increasingly connected world, most people’s personal data is available for all Internet users to access. This certainly takes away much of our privacy, since it is possible to obtain information such as address, kinship, email accounts, telephone number, among many other personal details.

Despite those legal protections, credit and debit card numbers are frequently stolen. You can beef up your shopping security with services like Abine Blur that let you shop using virtual credit cards.

Abine, Inc. is the online privacy company. Their mission is to bring easy-to-use online privacy tools and services to everyone who wants them.

The Online Privacy Company, announced today that anyone who had their personal information hacked in the Equifax data breach is eligible for a free month of DeleteMe the #1 privacy protection service in the world when subscribing to DeleteMe.

Abine Inc., The Online Privacy Company, today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued to Abine United States Patent No. 9,703,988 – a significant patent for privacy and identity protection using its anti-tracking and tokenization technology.

Sure you can block annoying auto-play video ads (here are tips) but the industry still wants to show you ads.

Sure you can block annoying auto-play video ads (here are tips) but the industry still wants to show you ads.

Blur for Abine: Helps user generate unique passwords for various accounts, as well as protects against fraud by masking your credit card number.

Your laptop and that smartphone grafted to your hand are double agents. What you look at, where you go and even what you say can be used to paint a portrait of you leaving you as exposed as the day you were born. Much of Silicon Valley wants you to think the price of using the internet is letting them data-mine your life.

Se empresas como Google e Facebook podem monitorar a navegação de seus usuários para vender publicidade, então os provedores de acesso internet também podem. Pelo menos no entender dos senadores americanos, que nesta sexta-feira aprovaram a legislação que passa a permitir que os ISPs passem a monitorar e a vender o histórico de navegação de seus clientes para anunciantes. O projeto segue agora para votação na Câmara, onde a maioria republicana é favorável à medida.

Just about anything you'd like to know can be found through a quick Google search. And while that's great when you're wondering about the GDP of China or the closest sushi restaurant, it can be disconcerting when you Google yourself and find personal information you thought was private. The sum of online information about you is called your digital footprint. Depending on your activities, your footprint can be very large or quite small.

When the first phone book was published in 1878, it had only 50 entries, giving subscribers the names of fellow citizens privileged enough to have a telephone. Today, the ultimate privilege is being unlisted — but thanks to a complex ecosystem of online people search services, that’s nearly impossible.

If you’re not paying for the product, you ARE the product. I hear that trope in many contexts. In this day and age, there is still the perception that having to go through a paywall provides some sort of protection for someone’s privacy. As if shutting down one’s Facebook or LinkedIn account will resolve the serious erosion of the fourth amendment practiced by the government and the private sector alike. We should be thinking of privacy in terms of gatekeeping. If there is a gate (whether paid or not) between a user and a service, chances are that the gatekeeper is profiting of off that user’s data.

Facebook on Monday moved to prevent spy applications from accessing its users' data. The company has updated its Facebook and Instagram policies to prohibit developers from using data obtained from those platforms in surveillance tools, according to Rob Sherman, deputy chief privacy officer at Facebook.

In an ideal world, targeted ads would show us the exact product we want to buy right now. In reality though, it seems like it’s all a big guessing game and products you searched for and don’t necessarily want come back to pester you to buy them. It’s as if someone is following you around the internet.

The internet has your number—among many other deets. Prevent identity theft and doxxing by erasing yourself from aggregator sites like Spokeo and PeekYou. t doesn’t matter what you do online: The internet knows a ton about you, and that information is a mouse click away.

We like to think we have control over our online identities...But there are sites that allow just about anyone to have access to your personal information with a simple search.

If you do one thing today, share this security tip with family and friends.

Twenty-one years ago, shopping from the comfort of your home was only possible through infomercials and home shopping networks.Then, in 1995, Amazon introduced the world to the notion of 'online checkout' on their site, allowing customers to check out with just the click of a branded buy button. A few years later, PayPal's button helped boost fledgling marketplace eBay to the big time, and the eCommerce boom was on.

If you're reading this, it's highly likely your personal information is available to the public. And by "public" I mean everyone everywhere. And while you can never remove yourself completely from the internet, there are ways to minimize your online footprint. Here are five ways to do it.

Over the past year, I've read countless "privacy guides" for Windows 10. Most are well-intentioned, but they invariably take a simplistic approach to privacy: Just turn off every switch in the Privacy section of the Settings app.

Apple Pay popularized the concept of tokenization -- creating one-time codes for merchants to validate payment cards so consumers don't have to share sensitive, valuable account information. But Apple Pay works only in stores or apps right now.
For consumers who remain rightly uneasy about typing their card information into a web browser, several startups are offering tokenization services. These fintechs are partnering with banks to obtain the real bank and card information that they obfuscate online.

Abine is the leading online privacy company, making easy-to-use tools for consumers to protect online identity and control what personal information companies, third parties, and other people see about them online. Since the ways companies collect, share, and sell data is constantly changing, Abine's team strongly believes online privacy solutions must continuously improve and evolve to address these challenges. Now, Millions of people use Blur and DeleteMe to protect their online privacy.

As someone who can tell a personal story of online slander, I advocate that everyone should take control of their online reputation. Whether it is to bury unsavory information or to build a strong, personal brand, understanding the impact of how you appear in search results or are portrayed by others can have a huge impact on landing a client or job.

Sitting by ourselves in the comforting glow of a laptop screen, it’s easy to mistake the Internet as a private, safe, and free space. It’s just us and the webpage, one-on-one, so what’s the harm in filling out a few forms here or there? We sign up for a site and automatically put in whatever information it asks for, thus handing the company control over our identities.
The Internet comes with a price, and that price is information.

It's one of the Internets oft-mentioned 'creepy' moments. A user is served a banner ad in their browser promoting products on a site they visited hours, days or months in the past. It's as if the ads are following them around from site to site. Most people know that the issue of ad stalking - termed 'remarketing' or 'retargeting' - has something to do with cookies but that's barely the half of it.

Smart technology is everywhere. If you’re like most business people, you can’t help but feel that there are too many tools out there. They all sound the same. Which leaves you confused, frustrated, and uninterested in changing. Let’s cut through the clutter. Here are a few awesome business tools you need to be using...

Every season is a good season to guard your personal credit data because every time you use a bank card, there is some risk. However, the holidays are a prime time for card number theft simply because there are so many extra transactions made. If you’re really concerned about being hit by fraud, consider masked credit cards. They’re a fraud-proof way to buy online while holding onto your peace of mind.

Want to make sure that your private information always remains private, even when you’re on the go? Then be sure to check out our round-up of the 7 Best Privacy Apps for your phone. At SaferVPN, we know how valuable security and privacy can be, especially when it comes to the Internet, mobile and browsing the web.

More and more of our time is spent online and on our phones, meaning more of our personal lives take place here as well– whether it be sending personal or work-related emails and messages, sharing thoughts and memories on social networks, making purchases, taking photos, jotting down notes and more.

Sign up to get a discount. Email address required. Install a new messaging app. Phone number, please! And if you're part of the dating scene, you certainly know the pains of people wanting your details before you're ready to give them. Every time you give away your email address or phone number, you effectively risk ruining it. What if someone spams you or sells your information to another spammer? What if you really don't want a second date, but the person in question can't seem to take "no" for an answer?

There is a solution.

Abine is a privacy company based in Boston. Their goal, similar to our own, is to create easy-to-use, accessible privacy solutions for the everyday internet user. There are two main products offered by Abine: DeleteMe and Blur — two previous products, MaskMe and Do Not Track Me, are encompassed within Abine’s powerful Blur product.

People like me could wreck the Internet. And suddenly, there are a lot of people like me. For years, I’ve used browser-based software that blocks most of the advertisements on Internet sites. I don’t mind most ads, but the blocker hides the most annoying ones, and speeds up my browser. If everybody used ad blockers, or just 50 percent of everybody, many free, ad-supported Internet sites would disappear. But since few of us used blockers, there was nothing to fear.

One of the limitations of Bitcoin is that many online merchants are still reluctant to accept it as a valid payment. However, a service called Bitcoin Anywhere, recently launched by Boston-based privacy company Abine might just fix this problem.

Using the Bitcoin Anywhere service users can make online payments with Bitcoins on any online portal that accepts MasterCard credit cards. The Bitcoin Anywhere service works by linking a user's Coinbase Bitcoin wallet with Abine's Masked card service called Blur. Any payment made through the Masked Card is then deducted from user's Coinbase wallet’s Bitcoin balance.

Abine, a Boston based firm which calls itself the “online privacy company” is offering a bitcoin payment service called Bitcoin Anywhere. The Bitcoin Anywhere service enables users to make online payments on any online portal that accepts MasterCard credit cards.<\p>

The Bitcoin Anywhere service works though Blur “Masked Card”. These Blur Masked Cards will be connected to the individual user’s Coinbase bitcoin wallet. All Payments made through the Masked Card will be deducted from the connected wallet’s bitcoin balance.

Don't do anything on the Internet that you would be ashamed of in real life. You will get caught. If Home Depot and the federal government can have their digital security systems compromised, then little old you on your little old PC will be no match for a dedicated hacker

Want to hear something a little bit creepy? Anybody who's willing to pay online information brokers - aka people-search sites - can learn your phone number, address, criminal record and a lot more. Even more creepy? This information doesn't always come at a price. You could be giving it away.

The way people shop is changing every day. Thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and innovations in delivery and data, the retail landscape is evolving like never before. From an established e-commerce giant deploying drones to an inventive pizza chain, here are 25 companies that are revolutionizing the industry.

A hidden feature in the open-source Firefox browser can cut load times for modern web pages nearly in half. So why isn't this feature easy to find and enable? Blame the well-funded online advertising industry.

Mozilla has included a feature in Firefox that can dramatically speed up web browsing. In a paper that was awarded top honors in the recent Web 2.0 Security and Privacy workshop, Mozilla researchers reported that turning this feature on dramatically improves performance on top news sites, page load times by 44 percent.

Android devices have supported tap-to-pay transactions in brick-and-mortar stores for years with Google Wallet, but at the 2015 I/O developer conference, the search giant showed how those transactions will work in the future with Android Pay.

I was shown a phone running an e-commerce app. A Google representative browsed through the online shop (which sold rubber horse masks and nunchuks), before selecting an item. Where he would normally be prompted to select a credit card, an Android icon indicated that he could use Android Pay. A tap later, the purchase was complete.

It makes psychological sense that in a culture where we are gradually losing control of decision-making and privacy, people would glom onto any power play that offers the illusion of autonomy. These days, the ability to push the “opt-out” button offers such pseudo-self-determination in various arenas.

Some choices seem better-thought-out than others. Too many people, I fear, are opting out just because they can.

We read stories all the time about people opting out of telemarketing lists, refusing inoculations for their children, deciding to reject standardized testing for their school kids, forgoing careers outside the home in favor of raising children, deciding to move off the grid, refusing medical testing, or trying to disappear in a data-infused universe.

Identity management within an organization is a very important component of intrusion protection. "Outsiders that want to hack into organizations are becoming smarter," said Gurucul CEO Saryu Nayyar, "so we're seeing a pretty steep rise in compromised accounts." Gurucul uses big data analytics to create a context around everything connected to the network -- users, accounts and devices.

Cyberdefenders for years have adopted Fort Apache strategies to protect their networks. Strong perimeters could prevent attackers from reaching precious data, they reasoned.

Anyone with an online presence is vulnerable to potential threats. For influencers who share information about their family and friends, the danger is increased but as a professional, you need to be out there. Can you protect yourself and still share things publicly?

This guide will help you reduce security risks while maintaining your online presence.

Like a lot of people, you may be vaguely uncomfortable with how much Google knows about you. It makes a great deal of money mining your search history in order to help various companies serve you targeted ads, and even though it doesn't sell your data to advertisers now, you never know if it might change its mind sometime down the road.

So what can you do about it? The Boston-based privacy company Abine has one solution. Earlier this year it launched Private Search, a service designed to shield your Google queries so the search giant can't link what you’re searching for to its increasingly detailed profile of you.

Spartan and IE no longer default to turning on the Do Not Track (DNT) signal. Having IE turn that on by default used to be a strong, if hollow, statement that Microsoft wanted to protect user privacy online.

It was a strong statement because it upset advertisers, who doubtless hoped that users would never get around to turning DNT on. It also upset people in the DNT working group because they thought it gave advertisers an excuse for ignoring DNT, resulting in the W3C spec saying DNT should be off by default so that it reflected a deliberate choice. And it was ultimately hollow because the DNT spec never actually clarified what 'not tracking' actually meant and hardly any sites ever looked for the signal.

It’s been nearly two years since former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden first leaked to the Guardian that the NSA was spying on American citizens. A new survey from the Pew Research center finds that the revelations of the mass government surveillance programs has definitely impacted the way certain segments of the American population now view their privacy — but that hasn’t yet translated into behavior changes.

Email hacks, identity theft, and online credit card fraud can be devastating. If you've never been the victim of a breach, count yourself lucky, but don't let your luck lead you to complacency. Making your online identity and activities more secure really doesn't take too much effort at all. In fact, several tips about what you can do to be more secure online boil down to little more than common sense.

These 10 tips for being more secure in your online life will help keep you safer.

How to stop a people-search site from finding you

• Source:
• Consumer Reports
• 03/20/2015

Believe it or not, you have no explicit right to stop what people-search sites are doing. But some website privacy policies let you opt out and have your information removed. And if you do so, your decision must be honored. Sites that don’t have an opt-out provision might rely on major data brokers that do have one. So it pays to opt out of the big ones, including Acxiom, Ameridex, Google, InfoUSA, Intelius, LexisNexis, PeopleFinder.com, and Spokeo.

But with more than 250 websites in the business, a paid opt-out service might be the easiest way to protect yourself. DeleteMe, a service that costs $129 per year, covers 15 sites and others that aggregate data from those sites.

Pew: Nearly One-Third Of Americans Hide Information Online

• Source:
• NPR Blog
• 03/16/2015

While one-quarter is not the majority, it is eye-grabbing. The Pew study indicates that the niche market for privacy tools may go mainstream. Companies like Wickr and Dstrux offer self-destructing tools for email and social media posts, with the promise of "zero digital footprint." Abine Blur let's you shop online without revealing your personal email and credit card number. These are hardly household names, but that could change.

More than half of Americans are worried about the U.S. government's digital spies prying into their emails, texts, search requests and other online information, but few are trying to thwart the surveillance.

That's according to a new survey from Pew Research Center, released Monday. A main reason for the inertia? Pew researchers found that a majority of those surveyed don't know about online shields that could help boost privacy or believe it would be too difficult to avoid the government's espionage.

Abine announced the release of Bitcoin Anywhere, a new service that lets users spend bitcoin at all online merchants that accept MasterCard. The service, currently in an invite-only beta, permits funding of a Blur “Masked Card” from a Coinbase wallet.

Startups are catching onto the trend, too. Abine, a privacy company, bills its Blur service as an “all-in-one solution for managing your online life and protecting your private information.” The firm promises to mask your email (essentially your passport around the web), encrypt passwords, and block trackers. For $39 a month, it also will hide your credit-card details and provide temporary phone numbers. Rob Shavell, Blur’s CEO, believes that there is an opportunity to create a billion-dollar company in privacy.

Abine offers Bitcoin users to make purchases through online commerce service easier and more effectively via Bitcoin Anywhere.

Online privacy company Abine has announced the launch of Bitcoin Anywhere, enabling Coinbase wallet holders to make bitcoin purchases at any e-commerce site.

Vendors of privacy products geared toward consumers are broadening their efforts to address the business market.

“These are big problems,” says Rob Shavell, co-founder and CEO of Abine, a data-privacy firm that helps users secure personal information. “There ought to be email warnings, there ought to be two-factor authentication. It’s true for us, it’s true for Venmo, it’s true for all these services.”

In the absence of legal reforms, the pervasiveness of online surveillance and consumer tracking is beginning to turn privacy into a 21st century luxury item. To meet savvy Internet users' demands, a growing number of tech firms offers those with the desire for privacy – and the means to pay – everything from self-destructing e-mail messages to the virtual equivalent of Kleenex, throwaway identities to keep advertisers, merchants, and government snoops at bay.

"This shouldn't be a crime because the reality is any 12-year-old with an Internet connection and a $5 allowance can get access to 100 million usernames and passwords in a few minutes — much faster and easier than streaming a Netflix movie," said Rob Shavell, CEO of Abine, an online privacy company.

This week's alarming cybercrime news is the Anthem breach, where possibly 80 million sensitive customer records were snatched from America's second largest health insurance company.

It's ugly news. Healthcare record storage is where we're flat-out vulnerable, yet there's little we can do to protect our information when it's in someone else's hands.

Abine today announced its new Private Search anti-tracking add-on ‘Blur’ for Firefox for those who want to use Google Search without being tracked by Google.

After all the recent credit hacking news, many people are a little more hesitant about using plastic. Blur is a service that makes your shopping a little more secure by generating "fake" credit card numbers to deter hackers.

Unless you're living off the grid in a cabin in the woods -- and, if you're reading this, you're probably not -- you have more passwords than you can manage. They're all supposed to be long, complicated, unique, and difficult to guess. Oh, and you're supposed to change them all every three to six months.

The simple answer is to use a password management program.

It's Data Privacy Day and Facebook Knows You're Reading This

• Source:
• Beta News
• 01/28/2015

"By the end of 2015, anybody who wants to use the Internet safely should be using Private Search, alongside a password manager and a secure payments service," says Rob Shavell, CEO of Abine. "Blur users can use the best search engine the way it used to be -- simple and not nosy".

Worried about credit card thieves stealing your personal information? You may benefit from a credit card masking service called Blur that creates one-time card numbers for each of your transactions.

The program was created by Abine, a privacy firm in Boston that wanted to give credit cardholder the ultimate protection against hacking and identity theft. Since the Target data breach took place in late 2013, credit card companies, retailers and financial institutions have been scrambling to come up with new security measures for their customers. Blur could be the missing link.

SplashData on Tuesday published its annual list of the top 25 most common -- thus worst -- passwords leaked online. In the top spot was "123456," followed by "password" and "12345."

While complete anonymity these days is nearly impossible, experts have some tips, and tools, they recommend for maintaining privacy and keeping your digital footprint as minimal as possible.

While new password managers continue pop up in app stores almost every day, it seems, tech experts say Keeper is one of only a handful that really are good. “Keeper is the only product out there that started with a mobile focus first, where other password managers tacked on a mobile feature later,” says Rob Shavell, CEO of Boston-based Abine, an online privacy company that also provides a password service.

While new password managers continue pop up in app stores almost every day, it seems, tech experts say Keeper is one of only a handful that really are good. “Keeper is the only product out there that started with a mobile focus first, where other password managers tacked on a mobile feature later,” says Rob Shavell, CEO of Boston-based Abine, an online privacy company that also provides a password service.

“If you use the same password at multiple sites, you are facing real consequences when one of those sites is compromised,” Andrew Sudbury, a founder of Abine, an online consumer privacy company, said of the incidents in an email. “Here, the airlines are claiming that’s what has happened — passwords taken from other sites were also the passwords for their frequent flier log-ins,” he said. “Frequent flier programs are places where you may not log in often, so it may be tempting to re-use a password. Don’t. You should use strong, unique passwords for your log-ins, which is something that’s easy to do with a password manager.” ​​

Eugene Kuznetsov, co-founder of the online privacy software company Abine, sees super cookies as the next wave of intrusive trackers. It started with cookies and has grown more complex. Now, there's unique device IDs (on smartphones and tablets) and unique browser fingerprints, which are harder to shake off.

Super cookies just make it even trickier to stay anonymous online.

So what can you do?

Be proactive. Some search sites do let you opt out. Get step-by-step instructions at abine.com/optouts.php. But prepare yourself: Some (like Intelius) require a photocopy of your driver's license and other hoop-jumping. And if you're removed from the site, which doesn't always happen, data may be reposted, so you should regularly recheck. For a fee, such companies as Abine, Safe Shepherd and AVG PrivacyFix will do the legwork for you.

Take Control of Your Finances in the New Year

• Source:
• PC Magazine
• 12/29/2014

Another great service that protects your money and identity while you shop online is Abine Blur. For $39 per year, Blur masks your actual personal details while you surf and shop online, keeping your real email address and credit card number out of anyone else's hands. There's "lite" free edition to try, too.

PC Mag Review of Blur

• Source:
• PC Magazine
• 12/15/2014

You've heard it over and over: Avoid giving your private information when you're online. Sometimes, though, you just have to. When you buy the latest gadget online, you give the merchant your address for shipping, credit card details for payment, and email address for notifications. But for $39 per year, Abine's Blur service will let you shop and surf in privacy, masking your actual personal details. It also includes a full-scale password manager. A free edition includes password management, email address masking, and tracker blocking.

Security solutions developer Abine has created a terrific app called Blur that works with popular desktop web browsers as well as Android devices, iPhones and iPads. The solution includes four main security features in addition to a variety of features that enhance the user experience.

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In a world of data breaches and websites that track your every move, protecting your personal information isn't easy. That's where Blur comes in. A new tool from online privacy company Abine, Blur lets you browse the Web without being tracked or forced to provide personal information in order to log in or complete transactions.

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Along the same lines, the app can create unique credit card numbers for each website you buy things on. This means that if one company suffers a breach, it won’t be a nightmare like it is when your actual credit card details are stolen.

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Boston online privacy company Abine released a new product of its own today. The company’s new Blur tool lets consumers protect payments, passwords, and personal info online. More importantly, as part of the release, Blur allows users to block companies and websites from tracking and collecting personal data online and through mobile devices.

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“Even people who are innocent are presumed guilty when it comes to Internet searches,” said Robert Shavell, co-founder of Abine, an online privacy company based in Boston.

Unfortunately, when it comes to mugshots, Shavell told me, there’s little that can be done in the United States or even in Europe, which recently passed a marginally effective “right-to-be-forgotten” law.

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"Blur is the first all-in-one solution that protects your passwords, payments, and privacy. It gives power back to people making it simple to choose what amount of their personal information they are OK providing to any website: no matter a) what they are doing- surfing, creating a new account, or shopping, or b) what device they are using – mobile phone, browser or tablet."

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"My personal opinion is that they’ve put together enough of the puzzle pieces -- security, software, hardware -- that it should drive real adoption," Shavell said. "I don’t think they’ve been combined before in mobile payments, although that’s a pretty low bar."

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For many users, there's concern that is more important than simple annoyance: privacy. Some sites do more than just plaster their content with digital billboards. They log your visits (usually via IP addresses) and even track your movements to other destinations. Although the driving motivator is usually just broad-based data-gathering, it can be unsettling to realize you're being followed online.

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This is a simpler, safer, and more convenient way to shop – especially online. This is how consumers should protect themselves from data breaches of any type in the future.

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DoNotTrackMe will block sites like Facebook from dropping lines of code into your browser and allowing it to track you.

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During a visit to any given website -- including this one -- the average user's browser may execute a dozen or more tracking scripts, each with its own associated tracking cookie, stored on the user's computer. This enables website publishers and ad distribution networks to record a visitor's online activity and then serve up "interest-based" or "behaviorally targeted" ads -- customized messaging based on that activity.

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One of the biggest concerns faced by individuals creating their identities online is security. Keeping one’s identity safe and secure is not easy in the digital world because there is a great information gap between technicians of the cyberspace and common users of the World Wide Web.

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Consumers who are feeling timid about using their credit cards following the massive data breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus might find solace in a new security system that uses randomly generated credit card numbers to fend off potential hackers.

The service, called MaskMe, was developed by the Boston-based privacy firm Abine, which is behind the popular blocking software DoNotTrackMe.

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As many Target shoppers have found in recent days, our latest credit card statements come with unexpected surprises. At my home, that means a charge of $897.59 from Sprint Wireless on December 9 based in Littleton, Colorado. That’s enough for two high quality smartphones – great gifts for the holiday season. But apparently for someone else’s family.

News about scope of the theft at Target, whose computer systems transmitted millions of credit card numbers into the hands of thieves in late November into December because of malware, continues to expand. On Friday, the company announced that strongly encrypted PIN data was stolen from their systems, although Target is confident that PIN numbers will remain secure.

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Whenever you buy something online with a credit card, you have to provide your name, number and address, information seen by the processing banks as well as the merchant. Boston privacy company Abine has introduced Masked Credit Cards that allow you to use their address, any name you want and a one-time number. Once a user signs up, the program quickly fills out the merchant’s online form, making the service faster than entering out your card details each time.

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Cyber security experts have cautioned consumers this holiday season to use extra care in making online credit card purchases. Scam operators have stepped up their efforts to take advantage of consumers in search of great deals.

“Especially around the holiday season we get these emails with great deals that almost look too good to be true,” said Rob Shavell, co-founder of Boston based Abine, a software firm specializing in privacy. “But there are some great deals out there and some are totally legitimate. Sometimes it's hard to tell them apart. You never quite know where your information is going when you buy or sign up for something online.”

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Think twice next time a store asks for your phone number, email or zip code. If you fork it over, you're feeding the beast of consumer data collection -- and putting your own information at risk.

Target's disclosure that credit card thieves hacked a database of 70 million customers is a wake-up call. "It's like an arms race for consumers' information at this point," said Susan Grant, an advocate for the Consumer Federation of America.

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Whenever you buy something with a credit card online, you also have to provide your name, number and address, information seen by the processing banks as well as the merchant. What if you don’t want them to know who you are, or you worry that someone may hack into the merchant’s files?

Boston privacy company Abine has introduced Masked Credit Cards that allow you to use their address, any name you want and a one-time number. Once a user signs up, the program quickly fills out the merchant’s online form, making the service faster than entering out your card details each time. This week the company announced that through Christmas, they are waiving their normal $5 monthly fee for MaskMe.

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A Boston-based company, Abine, is beefing its anti-tracking browser extension to let users shield their real credit card details, email addresses and phone numbers during web transactions.

The new features are being added to "DoNotTrackMe," an extension for Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari that blocks tracking technologies used by advertising and social networks and data collectors.

The latest capabilities, which were already in Abine's MaskMe password management tool, allow users to give out a one-time use credit card number to e-commerce vendors, along with a disposable email address and phone number.

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DoNotTrackMe (DNTMe) is another tool for web browsers that collates who is tracking your browsing habits and blocks them.

Unlike Ghostery, which allows users to select which companies to block, DNTMe automatically blocks the majority of attempts to track a user. DNTMe blocks companies based on a list of hundreds of web server addresses used by advertising and other companies that track users. DNTMe stops the browser from communicating with these addresses.

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If you desire more privacy in the digital world we live in, get used to this idea: You will have to work at it.

Abine, maker of the widely used DoNotTrackMe blocking tool, recently launched MaskMe, a free service that makes it simple to obscure your true e-mail address, phone number and credit card account numbers while conducting Web transactions. "We believe consumers should have full transparency about how their data is being collected and used," says Abine CEO Bill Kerrigan. "Our vision is to give consumers far more control in that equation than they've enjoyed in the past.".

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Such doubt is also shared by Sarah Downey, a lawyer at Abine, a privacy company that provides online masking tools. “My first reaction is that it’s good. It’s good for data brokers to be more open and honest about what they’re collecting. But that’s not all they have — there’s a discrepancy between what marketers can buy and what people can see about themselves,” said Downey in a recent phone interview.

All of this suggests Acxiom’s initiative may have backfired: the disclosures don’t seem to be reassuring consumers, and nor are they likely fend off the FTC, which has been making noises about regulating the data collection industry.

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Online shopping can be a great way to find serious deals, but bargains can come at a price: the risk of credit-card fraud and identity theft is omnipresent. One person is a victim of identity theft every three seconds in the U.S., costing US$4,930 on average each, according to Abine, a Boston-based online-security company,

“No website can guarantee that it can absolutely keep your data safe,” says lawyer and Abine privacy analyst Sarah Downey. “They just can’t.”

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If you’re like me, the idea of knowing what’s in your genetic profile is both fascinating and scary. Want to learn about your ancestry? How about how likely you are to get Alzheimers or how fast your body processes caffeine? All of these clues are in your genes, and the company 23andMe can help you discover them.

It’s the stuff of science fiction, but it’s already here. That’s why I wanted to try out 23andMe as soon as I heard about it…but waited until I had the privacy tools to pull it off pseudonymously.

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Having your own website is as outdated as it is unnecessary. At one time, maintaining samgrobart.com was a way to show that I was Internet-savvy, and the novelty of a site overshadowed its uselessness. Now, though, we’re all reasonably fluent in how to use the Web. If I want to find out about you, I’ll do some reconnaissance on Facebook (FB). I’ll check your Twitter feed, your Instagram account, and your Tumblr page. Most of us already exist all over the Internet, whether we like it or not. “You have two résumés today,” says Sarah Downey, an analyst at online-privacy company Abine.

“There’s the one you carefully write and put on a personal website, and there’s the sum of all your online activity, which you have no control over.” Doing careful spadework on your own site is meaningless as long as that photo of you with the skull bong continues to lurk around the Web.

If you do want an online record of your employment history, isn’t that what LinkedIn (LNKD) is for? I’m no LinkedIn booster—its internal e-mail system, InMail, is terrible, and the site spams me with way too many updates. But it has become the place recruiters and employers go to find qualified employees. If you have a site of your own, how do you expect people to find it? Are you going to optimize “regional sales manager for a wholesale steel-pipe distributor” for Google’s (GOOG) search algorithm? Good luck with that.

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Who hasn't bought something online, only to receive a torrent of marketing spam that follows you around like a rabid puppy?

Abine's new MaskMe browser add-on and mobile app, debuting Monday, ensure that you can use the Web while avoiding the data stalkers by preventing you from giving out your contact info in the first place.

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French privacy watchdog CNIL said Friday that it plans to sanction Google following the search giant's refusal to implement privacy policy changes demanded by the group.

Google could owe France 150,000 euros ($202,755) for the violation, and then another 300,000 euros if it still refuses to comply three months after the first fine. However, CNIL has not ruled on what sanctions, if any, it will demand of the company. That news is expected sometime in the next week.

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Yet consumers who wish to protect their real-world identities today face a series of less-than-ideal choices: Avoid certain services, break the rules and risk banishment, or find technical workarounds, like Abine's MaskMe, which allows users to conceal identifying information and conduct transactions using pre-paid credit cards.

It seems the price of pseudonymity, like liberty, is eternal vigilance.

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Show me your search patterns, and I’ll tell you who you are. Your vacation dreams. Your health worries. Your job situation, your hobbies, if you are gay, hetero, single, or married. Your political orientation, shopping behavior, financial capabilities, food and alcohol cravings, drug habits, and all kinds of other interests and preferences.

Your searches are probably the No. 1 way to collect data about your private life. Forget about the encryption debate that’s been raging since Edward Snowden started leaking. Privacy starts with search.

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Sarah Downey, a lawyer at Boston privacy company Abine, is one of several to cite Twitter as a model company when it comes to privacy. She says they have implemented a “Do Not Track” policy in a meaningful way, have simple privacy settings, publish a good transparency report and have fought for users’ rights in court. She also put Mozilla, best known for their Firefox browser, at the top of her list for advocating stronger privacy in the face of extremely aggressive advertiser backlash.

A number of experts mentioned companies that offer privacy products such as search engine DuckDuckGo (which does not track searches) or email service Silent Circle. But singling out companies built around privacy is an unfair contest because that is the very reason they exist. Likewise, if we were looking at environmentally friendly companies, I would rather identify big companies that have embraced model standards in their industries rather than small manufacturers of solar energy panels, for example.

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Having your own website is as outdated as it is unnecessary. At one time, maintaining samgrobart.com was a way to show that I was Internet-savvy, and the novelty of a site overshadowed its uselessness. Now, though, we’re all reasonably fluent in how to use the Web. If I want to find out about you, I’ll do some reconnaissance on Facebook. I’ll check your Twitter feed, your Instagram account, and your Tumblr page. Most of us already exist all over the Internet, whether we like it or not. “You have two résumés today,” says Sarah Downey, an analyst at online-privacy company Abine. “There’s the one you carefully write and put on a personal website, and there’s the sum of all your online activity, which you have no control over.” Doing careful spadework on your own site is meaningless as long as that photo of you with the skull bong continues to lurk around the Web.

If you do want an online record of your employment history, isn’t that what LinkedIn is for? I’m no LinkedIn booster—its internal e-mail system, InMail, is terrible, and the site spams me with way too many updates. But it has become the place recruiters and employers go to find qualified employees. If you have a site of your own, how do you expect people to find it? Are you going to optimize “regional sales manager for a wholesale steel-pipe distributor” for Google’s search algorithm? Good luck with that.

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E-mail, social networks and other online services often request contact and payment information when users sign up. There are no rules, however, that prevent users from disguising their actual e-mail addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers as a privacy precaution. Abine, Inc., offers a Web browser plug-in for Firefox and Google Chrome called MaskMe that gives people the ability to create aliases for this type of personal information.

The free version of MaskMe creates an alternate e-mail address whenever a Web site asks for a user’s e-mail. E-mails from that site can be accessed via a MaskMe in-box or forwarded to a user’s regular e-mail account. The “premium” version of MaskMe—$5 per month—enables masked phone numbers, credit cards and access to the MaskMe iOS and Android apps, which let users view info about their Abine accounts from their mobile devices.

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E-mail, social networks and other online services often request contact and payment information when users sign up. There are no rules, however, that prevent users from disguising their actual e-mail addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers as a privacy precaution. Abine, Inc., offers a Web browser plug-in for Firefox and Google Chrome called MaskMe that gives people the ability to create aliases for this type of personal information.

The free version of MaskMe creates an alternate e-mail address whenever a Web site asks for a user’s e-mail. E-mails from that site can be accessed via a MaskMe in-box or forwarded to a user’s regular e-mail account. The “premium” version of MaskMe—$5 per month—enables masked phone numbers, credit cards and access to the MaskMe iOS and Android apps, which let users view info about their Abine accounts from their mobile devices.

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E-mail, social networks and other online services often request contact and payment information when users sign up. There are no rules, however, that prevent users from disguising their actual e-mail addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers as a privacy precaution. Abine, Inc., offers a Web browser plug-in for Firefox and Google Chrome called MaskMe that gives people the ability to create aliases for this type of personal information.

The free version of MaskMe creates an alternate e-mail address whenever a Web site asks for a user’s e-mail. E-mails from that site can be accessed via a MaskMe in-box or forwarded to a user’s regular e-mail account. The “premium” version of MaskMe—$5 per month—enables masked phone numbers, credit cards and access to the MaskMe iOS and Android apps, which let users view info about their Abine accounts from their mobile devices.

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On the legal front, Customer Commons is working with the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Center on terms and privacy requirements that individuals can assert in dealing with other entities in the world. This work dovetails with work by Mozilla, Personal.com, Terms of Service — Didn’t Read, The Standard Label, the W3C Tracking Protection Working Group and others.

I am also encouraged to see that the most popular browser add-ons and extensions are ones that block tracking, ads or both. Abine, AdblockPlus, Firefox’s Collusion, Disconnect.me, Ghostery, Privowny and PrivacyScore are all in this game, and they are having real effects. In May 2012, ClarityRay reported a 9.26% ad blocking rate in North America and Europe. Above that were Austria (22.5%), Hungary, Germany, Finland, Poland, Gibraltar, Estonia and France. The U.S. was just below that at 8.72%. The top blocking browser was Firefox (17.81%) and the bottom one was Explorer (3.86%). So it was no surprise to see Microsoft jump on the Do Not Track bandwagon with its latest browser version. In sum what we see here is the marketplace talking back to marketing, through developers whose first loyalties are to people.

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Facebook on Monday released transparency reports of government requests for its users' data. Privacy groups hailed the move as a positive step forward -- rare praise for the company, which has had a checkered relationship with those groups over the years.

Facebook's Global Government Requests Report shows that of the more than 70 countries requesting user information from Facebook, the United States, by far, was the biggest peeper.

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Last year, Niero Gonzalez, the 35-year-old founder of video gaming site Destructoid, was browsing TechCrunch and saw an article about OkCupid’s “brilliant” move to ask users with ad blocking software to donate $5 to the site. Gonzalez became curious how many of his own readers were blocking ads, so he turned to an outside company — BlockMetrics, now called PageFair — to do a site audit.

“We have a savvy, techy user base, but I was still shocked by how many were using ad blockers,” says Gonzalez. He says the site gets 3 million visitors per month. The audit revealed that nearly half of his readers were blocking his site’s ads. He estimates that the blocking was costing him “thousands” of dollars per month, and appealed to his readers as to what the site could do to recover that revenue, including asking them to unblock Destructoid or to sign up for a membership program that would entitle them to an ad-free experience. Gonzalez also asked his video game fanatics why they were blocking ads.

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Sarah Downey from Abine talks about Google e-mail privacy, how to be careful with personal information in messages.

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There's a new weapon available to people fighting the war on spam -- one that lets them protect their information by never giving it away in the first place.

The free version of MaskMe, a new tool from Abine, lets people create alias email addresses that they can use instead of their real addresses when websites ask for their contact information.

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We live in a world where people rightfully worry about whether their electronic communications are being tracked by the government, by companies or by criminals. Recent revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have certainly demonstrated that the government has the capability of knowing who you’re calling and how long you’re speaking. Other leaks indicate the possibility of government spying on email and social network activity. And, of course, there is also widespread tracking of our web activity by marketing companies to help them better target advertising based on who you are and what you’re interested in.

At his press conference last Friday, President Obama suggested that there could be future technologies to protect people against government snooping, but there are some technologies in place now that can help. “As technology develops further,” he said, “technology itself may provide us some additional safeguards.” He suggested that “maybe we can embed technologies in there that prevent the snooping regardless of what government wants to do. I mean, there may be some technological fixes that provide another layer of assurance.”

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To that end, she said, people will start seeing privacy innovation for services that don't currently provide it. Calling it "social networks 2.0," she said that social network competitors will arise that do a better job of protecting their customer's privacy and predicted that some that succeed will do so because of their emphasis on privacy.

Abine's recent MaskMe browser add-on and mobile app for creating disposable e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and credit cards is another example of a service that doesn't have access to its own users' data.

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You can’t fly under the radar without unplugging completely. But you can reduce your digital footprint. The focus is on government tracking, but the government is getting information from private companies that collect your data for commercial purposes. The supply chain starts with Google, Facebook and others mining data to make a product better or to sell you something. The goal is to reduce the amount of data that these private companies have on you.

Start with our DoNotTrackMe add-on for all major browsers. It blocks companies from collecting your data, and it makes these firms “visible,” so you can see the huge list of companies trying to get your info. For searching online, try DuckDuckGo.com. By default, it does not store any cookies or your IP address (a number that corresponds to the device you’re using and divulges your location), which can be tied back to a detailed profile of you. You’ll see ads, but they’re based on what you type into the search bar—contextually relevant but privacy-friendly.

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Our daily habits — when we wake up, how we get to work, what we like to watch when we get home — are being tracked by dozens of interconnected systems, from cell carriers to traffic cameras. Together, they could form a picture of your day in disturbingly high fidelity.

It's not just high-priority targets and would-be terrorists that leave a digital trail as they go about their business — millions of Americans each produce gigabytes of data associated with themselves just by walking down the street, browsing the Internet, and using their mobile phone. PRISM and XKeyscore may be in the news, but we've been tracked by other means for a long time.

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Online, everyone’s an open book — but now the National Security Agency is also keeping tabs on consumers’ activities online. Users increasingly wear their hearts on their screens, but security experts say there are ways to minimize your Internet footprint.

Services like MaskMe, software released earlier this month by online privacy firm Abine, attaches to a Google Chrome or Firefox browser. It creates and manages disposable email addresses and generates secure passwords, and whenever you sign up for a website, MaskMe offers users the option to give out their real information or create a temporary “safe mask” that can’t be traced back to a user’s real email address and other contact details. For a fee of $5 per month, it will also provide temporary credit card numbers for making purchases online: The retailer won’t know who made the purchase, and the credit card company also won’t have access to what the consumer bought.

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Everyone is an open book online, but are there ways to keep your profile away from prying eyes? MarketWatch's Quentin Fottrell offers tips.

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Online, everyone’s an open book — but now the National Security Agency is also keeping tabs on consumers’ activities online. Users increasingly wear their hearts on their screens, but security experts say there are ways to minimize your Internet footprint.

Services like MaskMe, software released earlier this month by online privacy firm Abine, attaches to a Google Chrome or Firefox browser. It creates and manages disposable email addresses and generates secure passwords, and whenever you sign up for a website, MaskMe offers users the option to give out their real information or create a temporary “safe mask” that can’t be traced back to a user’s real email address and other contact details. For a fee of $5 per month, it will also provide temporary credit card numbers for making purchases online: The retailer won’t know who made the purchase, and the credit card company also won’t have access to what the consumer bought.

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A phone that's always listening may seem like a privacy nightmare, but privacy experts told The Huffington Post that Touchless Control is actually executed quite well because it's optional -- and, by default, off -- and processes the information on the phone rather than through Google's servers.

"If it's only happening locally on the device, then that really eliminates most of the privacy issues most people would have," said Sarah A. Downey, a privacy analyst at Abine, a company that makes consumer online privacy tools. "There isn't any data stored."

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MaskMe Hides Your Phone, Credit Cards Online Behind Working Replacements.

If folks at the NSA really want to get at your data, they probably can—but that doesn’t mean you have to make it easy for them. A new service called MaskMe lets you create new logins, credit cards and phone numbers that act as proxies for your own. If they get compromised, just erase them. It’s done through a Web browser extension, and detects when you are signing up or logging into a service, offering to create a new email and password for it. You just remember a single master passphrase and it does the rest. Email will be forwarded to your real address, and if you start getting spammed you or suffer a security breach, a click means that email address no longer exists.

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But when you want to do anything real – like buying or selling something – all those privacy safeguards melt away. Unless you’re willing to dive into the shady world of virtual currencies, you’ve got to pull off the mask and pony up a real name, a working address and phone number, and an actual 16-digit credit card number.

That is, until now. Earlier this week Abine unveiled the latest incarnation of its fremium privacy plug-in for Chrome and Firefox, MaskMe. It’s a virtual smorgasbord of privacy tools.

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Hardly a day goes by without news of another organization suffering a data breach involving thousands or even millions of stolen user data records. If your email information appears in the mix, your antispam utility will probably see a spike in pointless mail. Abine's free MaskMe service lets you communicate with retailers, discussion groups, and other websites without ever giving them your actual email address, so they can't lose it in a data breach (or sell it to spammers). As a bonus, it also serves as a simple password manager.

MaskMe installs as an add-on for Firefox or Chrome; support for Safari and Internet Explorer is planned. The only immediately visible sign of MaskMe's presence is a small button on the toolbar.

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Our lives are increasingly online, which means a lot of our personal data is at risk.

Abine, an online privacy company, found that the three things users wanted most protection for were emails, phone numbers and credit card numbers. While there are multiple ways that do it separately, Abine attempted to put it all together and came out with MaskMe.

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Internet Explorer provides the best privacy protection of the bunch, says this report. Safari, Firefox, and Chrome follow, in descending order. In its current form, Do Not Track is not effective; the report encourages readers to support legislation strengthening privacy rights.

Finally, there are third-party Do Not Track utilities that actively prevent tracking, completely independently of any legislation. If you want to control who can track you, get one of these. Abine's Blur is free and effective; a licensed and re-branded version is bundled with ZoneAlarm Free Firewall 2013.

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Every time you go online, you face daunting security and privacy issues. Most browsers offer a choice of add-ons to help you create and manage strong, unique passwords, but that’s only half the battle. Giving your real email address, phone number, or credit card to a stranger exposes you to tracking and other privacy risks.

That’s the guiding principle behind MaskMe, a new online service from Boston-based Abine, which makes the privacy tool DoNotTrackMe. MaskMe combines privacy and security functions in a single tool that can be accessed via a browser or a mobile app. In the age of Big Data, it’s an idea whose time has arrived.

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Chrome/Firefox: When you sign up for a new web service, you're usually handing over a bit of personal information. At the very least, you're giving away your email address. MaskMe is a browser extension that lets you hide your information.

MaskMe essentially creates a dummy account that forwards one bit of personal information to another. So, if you use MaskMe to create an email address, it creates a fake one so you can register at a web site, and then forwards emails to your real one. This way, no service has all of your data in one place. The same basic process also works for phone numbers and credit card numbers, but you'll need to pay a $5/month fee to use those services. If you sign up for a lot of different services, the email masking alone is worth it, and if you're a bit spender online, the disposable credit card number may be worth that $5 premium.

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If folks at the NSA really want to get at your data, they probably can — but that doesn't mean you have to make it easy for them. A new service called MaskMe lets you create new logins, credit cards and phone numbers that act as proxies for your own. If they get compromised, just erase them.

It's done through a Web browser extension, and detects when you are signing up or logging into a service, offering to create a new email and password for it. You just remember a single master passphrase and it does the rest. Email will be forwarded to your real address, and if you start getting spammed you or suffer a security breach, a click means that email address no longer exists.

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Jeff Fagnan, a partner at Atlas Ventures, puts it simply: Privacy can be a business. “Theres a big segment of the population that would be willing to pay to be protected in that consumer experience around privacy,” Fagnan said.

This is a reality Fangan is betting on. Back in 2011, he and Atlas Ventures led a $5 million investment round in Abine, a Boston-based privacy company that’s created a variety of tools for blocking web tracking and removing personal data from data collection sites. The company’s most recent release is MaskMe, a comprehensive suite of privacy tools that even gives users the ability to use dummy credit card numbers. (For a fee, of course: MaskMe’s premium subscription runs for $5 a month.)

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A new freemium service, MaskMe, launched on Monday. MaskMe, from Abine, which is also behind DoNotTrackMe, allows a user to generate and use faux email addresses, credit card numbers, and even telephone numbers that "masks" their true information.

These aliases, or Masks, are managed by a Google Chrome or Firefox extension. The service is free for site logins and email addresses, but if you upgrade to the premium service ($5 per month) you gain access to the credit card and phone number features.

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Privacy-based vendor Abine unveiled a new tool on Monday that might help users keep from having their personal information so easily revealed online. MaskeMe is a browser extension and mobile app that promises to give users added privacy-protection via disposable email addresses, phone numbers and even credit card numbers.

“Until now, you haven’t had much of a choice in whether you give out your real personal info online. Whether you’re shopping, signing up for accounts, entering contests, or whatever you do on the web, it seems like every company demands your contact info just to use their services,” Sarah A. Downey posted on the Online Privacy Blog for Abine.

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Given recent news reports of US government spying on the Internet, Abine Inc. of Boston couldn’t have picked a better moment to introduce MaskMe, a new privacy tool that lets users send anonymous e-mails and make online purchases using dummy credit card numbers.

“This is how we’re going to use the Internet going forward,” said Abine’s chief executive Bill Kerrigan.

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A new privacy tool called MaskMe may help people evade data harvesting efforts by websites and marketers.

Many of the components of MaskMe, created by the privacy software developer Abine, are individually available elsewhere. But Abine has meshed them together into a convenient extension for the Chrome and Firefox browsers.

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On Monday, Abine announced a new privacy addon called MaskMe. MaskMe promises to protect your personal information by creating custom aliases that 'mask' your login information.

"In today's world of big data and NSA surveillance, consumers are realizing that any personal information they give away can be exploited," said Bill Kerrigan, Abine CEO. "The real lesson is to stop giving out your personal data in the first place. That used to be difficult for consumers, who didn't have a choice if they wanted to use online services.

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Why give away your private data?

Every time you sign up for a web service or buy something online, you’re entrusting some company with your information — whether your email address, an account login, or your credit card number. MaskMe is a new browser extension from Abine — the makers of DoNotTrackMe — that lets you hide your real info, instead generating fake email addresses, credit card numbers, and even telephone numbers that all point to the real thing. The idea promises all the benefits of using your real information while letting you insulate yourself from prying eyes and data breaches.

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Here’s an obvious reality about privacy breaches: Companies can’t lose data that they don’t have.

Taking advantage of this realization is privacy company Abine, which has officially announced MaskMe, an ambitious browser extension that gives users the privacy-protecting power of disposable e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and even credit card numbers.

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Let’s be clear. Your personal information online is not always yours to control.

Thieves could grab a Social Security number stored unencrypted in a doctor’s computer; the National Security Agency could order an e-mail provider to unlock correspondence; even the phone company could supply the police with a map of your whereabouts for the last several months.

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If the NSA is Big Brother, the increasing number of Google Glass wearers on the street are an army of Little Brothers.

Although impressive, this wearable technology comes with a rash of anti-privacy side effects. The Glass wearer chooses to be connected to Google’s servers, but the people in their lines of sight — and lens — do not.

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The days of anonymous online handles are pretty much over. Facebook demands that its users use their real names (although many don't), and many users of other social-media services, like Twitter and Instagram, choose to dispense with anonymity.

That may make the Internet seem like a safe place, but oversharing on social media can have real-life consequences on a user's reputation, bank account and even physical safety.

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Hosts: Leo Laporte, Ed Bott, Natali Morris, and Matthew Panzarino

Download.com wrappers, defining "Do Not Track", tyranny of the default, Dropbox backend, and more.

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Powerful privacy tools you can use to curtail how big tech companies — and sometimes the federal government — track your every step on the Internet have been available for years.

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If the recent news about the government's ability to peek into your private data worries you, you aren't alone. According to pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo, site traffic has surged some 44% since news of the NSA's Prism program broke. Even if you aren't concerned, a bit of security is never a bad idea: It can help keep your information private and out of the hands of hackers, marketers and anyone else who might want to make use of it in a way you might not like. Here are some simple, privacy-friendly ideas to help you keep ahold on your personal information.

As much as we love Google products, the company keeps tabs on a lot of your data, including what you search for. It uses this information to serve you tailored advertisements and will even give it to other sites so they can do the same. If you want to keep what you're searching for to yourself, try DuckDuckGo, which doesn't track any of your information or pass it on to others. But more than that, it's also a really good, highly customizable search engine.

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When you join a social network, it usually asks if you’d like help finding friends who also use the service. It sounds like a nice offer—much easier than manually searching the site. So you click “yes,” put check marks next to the people you want to follow, and go merrily on your way.

Congratulations: You’ve just donated all of your friends’ and colleagues’ email addresses and phone numbers to that social network’s internal database. If you’re lucky, its employees will treat your friends’ contact information with more respect than you just did.

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The dangers inherent in our changing expectations of privacy are “something I bring up a lot to explain why being vigilant about privacy is important,” says Sarah Downey, an attorney and privacy analyst for anti-tracking software company Abine.

“If American society gets complacent about things like widespread sharing of restricted information, NSA spying, and corporate data collection, we weaken our constitutional protections against privacy invasions and searches,” she says. In other words, the very act of sharing parts of your life online, or agreeing to hand over your data recklessly, potentially weakens the constitutional protections awarded to us all.

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A representative from Abine, a Boston-based pricacy start-up that offers the DoNotTrackMe browser add-on, sent over some compelling stats to this point. To date, Abine has 5.2 million installs of DoNotTrackMe.

But in the last couple of weeks, the service has been pretty much exploding. The rep tells me:

On June 14, there was a 98 percent growth over the previous week in installs. There was a 54 percent average increase in installs for the week of June 10 over the prior week.

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There are no silver bullets for online privacy. There are, however, tools you can use to make small but meaningful improvements in your online privacy. Here’s what I use:

For Web browsing, I have Abine’s free DoNotTrackMe add-on installed in every browser I use. It automatically blocks trackers (including those from Google and Facebook) but gives me the option to re-enable a third-party site if I need to. As a side benefit, it also makes web pages load faster.

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Abine privacy analyst Sarah Downey gives tips for protecting your privacy.

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Once considered tools for tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorists and stealthy corporate executives, software that allows you to hide your tracks online may have found its moment.

As details of the broad scope of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance programs have continued to emerge over the last week, services and apps that focus on privacy, encryption and preventing online tracking have surged in popularity. Most of the companies that market themselves as privacy-focused alternatives don't hold onto user data, so they have nothing to turn over to authorities.

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If the polls are to be believed, 56 percent of you will soon be flipping to the Sports section. That’s the percentage of Americans who don’t mind that huge amounts of our phone call records and Internet activities are being tracked by the government. And maybe they’re right. Lots of people have nothing to hide.

But I sure do, though I’m not worried about the cops. Cellphone carriers, Internet companies like Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., and companies with something to sell are all minding too much of my business. So I’m always looking for good ways to cruise below the radar.

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Companies that protect your privacy with software are seeing a big to their businesses following revelations that America’s internet giants have been turned into appendages of its surveillance state.

The companies don’t create products that are specifically designed to thwart NSA spying or government surveillance, but as Sarah Downey, privacy analyst for privacy software company Abine explained, “One thing that’s emerged [from the NSA leak] is that the social networks and data trackers are the source of the data supply chain. The private companies are collecting data and feeding the government with it. So if you want to stay more private, you have to limit the data that these companies gather about you.”

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The Verizon Wireless slogan “Can you hear me now?” has taken on new meaning in light of reports that the National Security Agency has been asking the company to fork over information about customer phone calls.

“If you take a step back for a minute, this is a huge, huge … issue, and it doesn’t just involve Verizon,” said Sarah Downey, a lawyer and privacy analyst for Abine. “If you are on Verizon, and calling anyone else in the US, your calls are being monitored. It really affects anyone, regardless if they are [committing] a wrongdoing.”

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It may raise hackles to think that U.S. intelligence officials might be monitoring your telephone and Internet communications, but for most of us it’s only the marketers who are really interested in our everyday online activities. And with many billions of dollars at stake, companies are increasingly turning to more sophisticated techniques to identify potential clients and deliver relevant advertising.

Many Internet advertisers rely on cookies, digital code stored on your browser. Some websites place multiple cookies when you visit, allowing them to track some of your activity over time (you can see who is tracking you by installing an application such as Ghostery or Abine’s “DoNotTrackMe”).

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When you choose to use Yahoo’s revamped interface, you also agree (unless you opt out) to let the service scan email arriving in your inbox for, among other things, information that can be used to target advertising to you.

While the scans may be legal, they still abuse individual privacy, argued Sarah A. Downey, a privacy analyst and attorney with Abine, an online privacy solutions provider. “It violates most people’s expectation of privacy,” she told PCWorld.

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It used to be that job candidates were judged on their resume, cover letter and references before the in-person interview. But now with social media, job candidates are being fully examined before even stepping foot into a human resources department, and some college students might find themselves at a disadvantage.

According to a survey of recent grads by online privacy company Abine, Inc, despite the fact that 69% of the Class of 2013 doesn’t yet have a job lined up, only 16% are spending time proactively improving their web presence.

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Companies keep finding new ways to collect our personal information and sell it to marketers and advertisers. Now wireless phone companies like Verizon make money off data about our physical location and the websites we visit. Of course, companies generally include a caveat: consumers are allowed to "opt out." But that’s not always easy.

On many websites, the option to "opt out" and limit the sharing of consumer data is not immediately obvious.

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Your inability to land a job might be blamed on the economy, your chosen college major or just the fact that you're not a code-happy engineer. For many, it's less about finding a job and more about finding a good job. Those are the underemployed in the Millennial generation who don't show up in unemployment reports.

One online privacy company wants to address the potential negative effects of social profiles. An Abine survey found that while most students updated their resume as part of a job search, less than 30% spent time removing potentially damaging content from social media accounts. Also, 84% have not created a professional website or other positive online content which would improve online search results for their name. If you're unaware how potential employers will perceive you online, try out Abine's Hireability Calculator.

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A seasoned employee knows the keys to workplace success include showing up early, staying late, dressing well, and seeking out mentors. This advice can be called the “No-Duh Guide to Corporate Ascendancy.” Any idiot who texts during a job interview doesn’t deserve the job. Yet, beyond these obvious tips, real-world workplace advice can prove enlightening and useful. So here’s a round-up of unconventional advice gathered from business executives we spoke with that they say has helped their careers, and that they are also what they look for in potential employees:

Create an alter-ego. Social media provides insight into everyone’s lives. It’s possible to track your boss via his Twitter feed. And, in turn, he can see your personal life, particularly those drunken party pictures. To this end, 35% of new college graduates have posted comments containing profanity, 30% have posted comments or pictures about alcohol, and 7% have posted content about illegal behavior, according to online privacy firm Abine. While there are always privacy settings, another effective way to separate a corporate identity from the personal is to create a stage name for your professional career. Hollywood has been doing this for ages. Actress Natalie Portman is actually Natalie Hershlag; Mark Vincent turned into Vin Diesel. The idea allows you to keep each side separate from the other, and if social media is full of images of you over-indulging in scandalous actions, a stage name allows you to start your professional life with a clean slate. Many are already doing this on LinkedIn. Only 38% of LinkedIn members use their real names on the site, reports Abine.

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As soon as you leave the office of a prospective employer, chances are she puts your resume aside and turns to Google to find what you've really been up to. And if you haven't taken the time to clean up your Facebook page, Twitter feed and other social media links that routinely show up in a Google search, you could lose a good opportunity.

Sixty percent of graduates are not concerned about their online profiles affecting their ability to secure a job, according to privacy software maker Abine's survey of 500 college grads from schools across the country. But they should be.

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Modern technology has not only changed students' collegiate experience, but their post-graduation job search as well. Today, individuals like Joel Smith, who recently graduated from the University of Tennessee, have jobs lined up thanks to social media, WATE-TV reports. Smith credits Facebook, LinkedIn and a lot of networking for helping him secure employment before he even earned his degree.

Unfortunately, not all students have as much luck as Smith - especially those who have not taken the time to tidy up their social media profiles before applying for jobs. A large number of graduates from the class of 2013 are among those who have not made improving their online presence a priority.

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Among Boston-area venture capital firms, Atlas Venture of Cambridge has been one of the most aggressive at providing seed funding to tech startups in recent years.

And so far, Atlas reports that seven of its seed-funded tech companies have gone on to raise Series A rounds — with all of the rounds including Atlas, and all of the companies based in the Boston area.

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When it comes to privacy, many of us are bare to the world. That’s why it’s important to understand Facebook privacy/account settings and how to alter them. The Web abounds with tips and tricks to do just that. Here are a few from major online privacy advocates.

1. Abine, A leader in online privacy software: To limit others posting on your timeline, edit your profile and change to “friends,” “only me,” or make a custom list of people you trust.

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Two surveys released earlier this month show that privacy remains important for Internet users – the problem is that the debate has been skewed away from reality. It’s time we brought this issue back out of Crazy Land.

The second survey (PDF), conducted by online privacy company Abine (maker of anti-tracker browser plugin DoNotTrackMe), also found that privacy is important to most people – 90 percent of the 1,004 respondents said so. Furthermore, Abine found that Millennials conducted themselves differently online – but not in the ways implied by the Annenberg study. Rather than abandoning privacy altogether, the Abine survey shows that young adults are simply more savvy about controlling their info online.

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It’s already bad enough that surfing through your Facebook News Feed is becoming such a chore because of ads the social network thinks you’d be interested in – but then earlier this year, Facebook revealed its intentions to further stretch its ad targeting program by partnering with Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai. When you surf sites on the Internet or use rewards or loyalty cards when you go shopping in the mall, you unintentionally leave a trace of your consumer habits and information, and these four companies gather that information to help them come up with better targeted advertisements. The partnership with Facebook plans to bring that information to the social networking site so that companies would be able to reach out to the right users, and maybe even lessen the annoyance you feel when you see a product page on your stream you don’t remember liking.

Facebook ads are becoming more predominant these days, and we’ve tried our best to minimize (if not completely opt-out of) seeing them. With the emergence of this initiative shared by Facebook and consumer data brokers, it may become harder to deal with – now that data sourced from outside Facebook is on the table, limiting your personal information on the social network will no longer be enough to get you off the ad radar. So if you want to do everything in your power to stop the Facebook tracking, these are the four places you need to head and opt-out of.

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Two studies released this week show that so-called millennials and adults in their thirties and beyond view online privacy differently and take different approaches to protect it.

The Abine survey looked at the specific actions younger and older users had taken to safeguard their online privacy. Baby boomers, Abine found, were more likely to define privacy in terms of offline behaviors, while millennials often thought of it as a digital phenomenon.

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There are a ton of browser extensions that promise to protect your privacy, which leads to some natural questions: Which is the best? Do they all do the same thing? What should I really download? In this guide, we're going to look at the most popular browser extensions that promise to protect your privacy online, and give you our recommendations.

We've talked about why you should care about your privacy several times here, so whether you choose to do something to protect yourself is up to you—we're not going to rehash it. Instead, we're going to dive into the tools available to keep your data safe. Most of them fall into three groups: add-ons that prevent third parties from tracking your movements, add-ons that block ads and scripts, and passive security tools that enforce good habits. Don’t worry, though. You don't need to download a ton of apps to keep yourself safe and your data close to pocket. Here are the best in each group.

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For more than a decade we've been hearing that privacy is dead, especially when it comes to online privacy. It's hard to argue with the evidence.

Law enforcement agencies routinely obtain location and call data from wireless carriers -- some 1.3 million times in 2011 alone, according to documents obtained by a U.S. Senate committee. Thanks to laws written when fax machines were considered high-tech, government agencies can access data from cloud storage with minimal judicial oversight. And with potential laws like the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), Congress wants to enable private companies to share even more customer data with Uncle Sam.

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You can choose to broadcast your life but the bystanders around you don't choose," says Sarah Downey, analyst at the online privacy group Abine. "The disconnect is that you're wearing these sorts of technology, you end up being a vector for surveillance. Everyone around you is your unwitting subject."

Continuing with the theme of overload, rarely a new way to share content launches without some reference to the principles of George Orwell's Big Brother. As a proof of how prevalent and how easy it is to be Big Brother now, I searched for an 18-year-old picked at random from a Twitter search. Within an hour, using only information in the public domain, I had his home phone number, postcode, school he attended, views on gender discrimination, his approach to casual homophobia - even golf handicap and the club at which he plays.

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There’s no doubt it’s a data driven world. But increasing concerns about companies’ collection and uses of personal internet user data have given rise to a few solutions.

One is a personal data locker where users would be able to store their own information and grant companies limited access, rather than abide by companies’ privacy policies. Some people have even talked about compelling companies to disclose the data they keep on consumers, even though it might be hard to understand and use.

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Facebook has introduced a new advertising feature that allows companies to show you ads based on what you buy offline.

Next time you go shopping at the local supermarket, Facebook — and its advertisers — want to know what you buy. The social media giant this week introduced a new program that allows its advertisers to show ads based on people's offline buying habits. Like many previous Facebook initiatives, the new feature, called "Partner Categories," is raising privacy concerns.

"It's a merger of online and offline IDs," said Sarah Downey, a privacy analyst and attorney with Abine, an online privacy company. "As a consumer it's tough to parse out all the different pieces of information."

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If you feel like Facebook has more ads than usual, you aren't imagining it: Facebook's been inundating us with more and more ads lately, and using your information—both online and offline—to do it. Here's how it works, and how you can opt out.

For most people, Facebook's advertising system is insider-baseball that doesn't really affect how we use the service. But as the targeted ads—the advertisements that take the data you provide to offer ads specific to you—get more accurate and start pulling in information from other sources (including the stuff you do offline), it's more important than ever to understand their system. To figure out how this all works, I spoke with Elisabeth Diana, manager of corporate communication at Facebook. Let's kick it off with the basics of how the targeted ads work online before moving on to some of the changes we'll see with the recent inclusion of offline shopping data.

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When Mark Zuckerberg and friends debuted Facebook Home yesterday, they downplayed the ever-growing importance your data has for the company. While the Facebook-obsessed may love Home, chances are your privacy won't feel welcome at all.

Facebook has earned a reputation for developing new products and features that are respectful of user privacy, and then slowly, sometimes with great subtlety and sometimes with mastodon-like lumbering, walking those policies back to a decidedly less-respectful state.

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Just a decade ago, people around the country worried about their personal privacy as cell phones and portable electronic devices started featuring small cameras, allowing users to easily snap photos of anyone, anywhere, at any time. Now, almost 10 years after camera phones hit the mainstream market, a new portable device is striking a similar nerve, and it’s raising issues about the future of public privacy and how consumers adapt to new technologies.

Later this year, Google is expected to introduce Google Glass, a hands-free device shaped like a pair of glasses that responds to simple voice commands and hand gestures to complete tasks like capturing video and giving directions. It’s a tech-lover’s dream, but already, questions are arising about how the device will impact peoples’ personal space.

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There are quite a few other features shared between this antivirus and the standalone firewall. Both offer a year of "Good Start" credit protection from Identity Guard, a button that invokes your browser's privacy mode, and 5GB of online backup hosted by IDrive. New this year, both will check your Facebook account and report on any privacy issues.

Powered by partner Abine, the Do Not Track Me toolbar button warns you about advertising links on the current Web page as well as other links that could be used to track your browsing habits. With one quick click you can set ZoneAlarm to prevent this type of tracking. Advertisers can choose to ignore the industry-standard Do Not Track header, but ZoneAlarm actively prevents tracking.

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This scene may seem like a simple trip to the store, something each of us does countless times every week. What many of us may not realize, however, is that the use of CVS ExtraCare and other loyalty rewards cards is but one of many ways we toss precious details about ourselves into the grip of an impossibly complex shadow industry that has increasing control over our lives. I’m talking, of course, about data brokers.

Those concerned with even minor violations of privacy have likely heard the term “data broker,” probably with a scowl on our faces. These are the companies that “know more about you than you know about yourself.” They collect information about the lives of nearly every adult in the U.S., from what we buy to who we love. And they use that data to make themselves, and countless other companies, bloody rich.

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Every day, tens of millions of people post remarkably intimate details about their lives on Facebook. And yet the operators of the online social network say they still don’t know enough about their subscribers.

So Facebook is purchasing even more information on its members from data brokers — companies that collect huge amounts of sensitive information about the everyday activities of millions of Americans. Facebook will use the data, as well as information provided voluntarily by members, to target them with more relevant — and profitable — advertisements.

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It’s often been said that we, as users, are “the product” of networks like Google or Facebook. But there is now a new wave of privacy centric start-ups seeking to give us back control of our personal data. One of these is Abine, the venture-backed Cambridge, Mass. based company which boasts a suite of products that protect our online privacy. Data protection is the “new frontier”, Abine’s CEO Bill Kerrigan, who describes his startup as “the online privacy company”, told me.

Indeed, re-empowering us with control of our own online data, Kerrigan insists, represents the next multi-billion dollar opportunity. And while he is hopeful that some of today’s major Internet players – such as Twitter, Mozilla and Microsoft – do respect our online information, Kerrigan – who used to run sales at McAfee – nonetheless warns that we are “one massive data breach away from Armageddon.” That’s scary for consumers, of course; but might actually be rather good news for entrepreneurs like Kerrigan who are betting that privacy really is the next Big Thing.

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Consumers are only just starting to realize what they need to do to protect their privacy, Abine CEO Bill Kerrigan discusses on digits.

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People search and background check websites, such as Zabasearch.com and Peoplefinders.com, make their business off our personal information--our names, addresses, phone numbers, and more. It's a terrible situation where to protect our privacy we have to go through all the work of opting-out of these databases. If you want to protect your privacy (as much as possible), you can find step-by-step removal instructions or hire services to do this for you with the sources below.

A little more than a year ago, Reddit user pibbman (thanks to LawyerCT's help) posted a list of major sites that gather and sell or publish your personal information, along with links and instructions for removal. Since posting about this on Lifehacker, I've found a similar guide, which is easier to read at a glance, from privacy company Abine, as well as services that will do it for you.

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Facebook has announced that it’s teaming up with four of the world’s largest corporate data brokers to “enhance” the ad experience for users. Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai obtain information gathered about users through online means (such as through cookies when users surf the web) as well as through offline means (such as through loyalty cards at supermarkets and product warranty cards). Through the new relationship with Facebook, companies will be able to display advertisements to Facebook users based on data that these data brokers have on individuals.

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Privacy is no longer just a regulatory headache. Increasingly, Internet companies are egging each other on to prove to consumers that their data are safe and in their control.

In some instances, established companies are trying to gain market advantage by casting themselves as more privacy-friendly than their rivals. For example, Mozilla, an underdog in the browser market, suggested last week that it would allow its users to disable third-party tracking software altogether.

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Online tracking is a bete noir of privacy enthusiasts, but many users are unaware of the data that advertisers and social networks collect about them as they browse the Web. Here is a tool to help you monitor and prevent such activity.

DoNotTrackMe is a free browser extension that blocks most major trackers and displays a visual representation of exactly how many trackers are operating on a given site. It works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. After you install it, a small button in the top-right corner of your browser displays a real-time count of how many tracking companies are monitoring your activity.

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Established companies are trying to gain market advantage by casting themselves as more privacy-friendly than their rivals.

News from the technology industry, including start-ups, the Internet, enterprise and gadgets.

In some instances, established companies are trying to gain market advantage by casting themselves as more privacy-friendly than their rivals. For example, Mozilla, an underdog in the browser market, suggested last week that it would allow its users to disable third-party tracking software altogether.

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A few months back, an advertising executive argued that more online privacy would kill free speech. Richard Frankel, president of the advertising company Rocket Fuel, titled the post “How the Do Not Track Plan Will Ultimately Kill Free Speech.”

It’s understandable that advertisers are so resistant to the concept of Do Not Track – it could change the way they access data, which would force them to innovate their business models and practices.

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Mozilla has announced that, starting with Firefox 22, the popular open source web browser will begin blocking third-party cookies by default. That means only websites you actually visit will be allowed to set cookies; advertisers on those sites will no longer be able to easily track you by setting a cookie.

While there has long been the option to block third-party cookies, by default Firefox has always allowed them.

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Facebook’s targeted advertising is already pretty sophisticated in understanding your tastes, but their ability to monitor your transactions could soon follow you into the real world. According to Ad Age, Facebook has teamed up with several data provider companies to track your purchases in actual brick-and-mortar stores. It will allow for brands to hone in even more accurately on consumers with targeted advertising on the site. On its surface, this plan seems like a giant leap toward Big Brother, but how it will work in practice isn’t quite so sinister.

The ad targeting will take place when data companies match up, anonymously, retail loyalty program members and Facebook users by using the phone number and email address members gave when they signed up for both services. However, Facebook is going to face an uphill battle in convincing a skeptical public that their personal information is safe, especially given the news of the recent Facebook hack reportedly perpetrated by Eastern European or Chinese hackers. “Facebook’s challenge is going to be breaking down the process in ways that are simple to understand and fostering confidence that this powerful data can be handled in a responsible way,” MEC Social Lead Kristine Segrist told Ad Age.

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Every day, you'll likely be handing out more than 700 items of personal data. But a growing chorus of experts believe that, rather than giving in to the inevitable loss of privacy, it's becoming easier for consumers to control that information.

Sarah Downey is an attorney and analyst for the online privacy software company Abine, which offers a service called DeleteMe that erases data from a number of tracking sites. The company also markets a "do not track me" option. About three million users count on that.

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More than half of U.S. adults shares details of their love lives on Facebook, according to a study of more than 1,000 people published by Abine, a privacy software company.

Nearly one in five respondents had posted provocative pictures of themselves or details of romantic encounters online. But more than three in five were not confident that what they shared on social media would remain private.

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Like a third wheel on a date night, the Internet now has a front row seat to many people's romantic lives, with more than one-third of social media users giving their account user names and passwords to the person they're dating, according to a Valentine's Day survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults conducted by online privacy firm Abine.

Despite increasing privacy concerns around social media and the Web, people continue to broadcast the sultry details of their love lives to the world, which presents former couples with an added challenge after the relationship status changes and the digital detritus remains.The survey results also illustrate how intertwined real-life relationships have become with digital lives: After a breakup, most people (63 percent) said they unfriend or block their exes on social media sites, and half of those surveyed said they would untag themselves in photos with their exes.

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Looking to have a romantic Valentine's Day with your sweetheart? Maybe you should use Facebook a little less.

Facebook just may be the third wheel in your relationship, according to a study from Abine Inc., an online privacy company based in Boston.

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As Valentine’s Day is Thursday, many are taking a look at how Facebook users share intimate details through the social network. A new study by Abine shows that many people aren’t shy about posting information such as relationship status and sexual orientation.

In a study of more than 1,000 U.S. adults, 50 percent said they post about their love lives on Facebook, compared with 37 percent who do so on other social media sites.

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An alarming news report that Raytheon Corp. has developed lightning-fast software that scours social media to profile millions of users — predicting their future behavior — has online privacy experts fearful that Big Brother could take a big technological step forward.

“This sort of software takes a very Dragnet approach,” Ginger McCall of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said about Raytheon’s Rapid Information Overlay Technology software. “It’s designed to pull in large amounts of information from not just people who are the subject of a criminal investigation but a large number of social network users.”

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Come Valentine's Day, Facebook is expecting a 200 percent increase in the number of new relationships posted to the site compared to any other day of the year. And with the flood of new love, ordinarily rational people may forget the basics of Internet privacy.

"We all know love can make us a little crazy, so it’s not surprising that people change their behavior and might go outside their typical comfort zones,” Sarah Downey, privacy analyst for Abine, an Internet security company, said in a statement. Abine conducted a survey that exposed the risky computer-related things that people do when they're part of a new relationship.

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Secret chats and rendezvous scheduling are commonly being done behind significant others’ backs via social networks. And as people become more and more tech savvy, cheaters are finding craftier ways of using these platforms for illicit acts of infidelity.

Of 2,400 American adults that have admitted to cheating at least one this past year, a recent study found that one-third of these adults have created a social media or email account that their partner didn’t know existed. And the most common social network that would be used to create a fake social media profile, with nearly 67 percent of cheaters having one, is Facebook.

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What if two-thirds of the people on the Web were invisible, secretly visiting websites and searching for products and services while leaving Internet giants like Google and Facebook in the dark about what they were doing?

With no information on those people's activities, there could be no targeted advertising for them and much of the multi-billion-dollar ad Web market would collapse, forcing big changes in the business models of today's biggest and most powerful Internet companies.

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Congratulations for taking a strong pro-privacy stance in your Feb. 4 editorial “Europe Moves Ahead on Privacy.” The lack of online privacy is a huge problem, and it’s only getting worse. As you pointed out, most consumers are still unaware of the scale and scope of online tracking. My company’s work and our collaboration with the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology on the Web Privacy Census confirm that online tracking is becoming more prevalent and sophisticated.

American consumers are a long way away from the real transparency, choice and control over their digital footprint that they need. While many American consumers might appreciate our government enacting policies like those being considered in Europe, the United States isn’t Europe and such privacy policies are not on the immediate horizon. But we are not as helpless in the face of the attack on privacy. Where policy has failed, technology has succeeded.

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Facebook is a personal vault that can contain photos of your firstborn, plans to bring down your government and, occasionally, a record of your indiscretions.

It can be scoured by police officers, partners and would-be employers. It can be mined by marketers to show tailored advertisements.

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The privacy test reports on any recent posts you've made totally public and any that you've allowed friends of friends to view. If you've been tagged in any posts in the last month it will report that too. A statistics pane reports the number of posts, likes, shares, and comments you've made during the month. Each of these is a live link to a detail report, for example, a list of all your comments.

New in this edition, a simple test will check the privacy of your Facebook account. Click a button on the toolbar to install the Facebook app, then launch it for a quick summary of privacy issues in your account.

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I typically ignore phone calls from unknown numbers, and that goes double for area codes from Texas.

It's almost always my credit card issuer, Bank of America, and it's almost always a courtesy call that lasts way longer than I have tolerance for.

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If you think someone is hot on your heels, you're not paranoid; you're right. In 2011, identity fraud increased by 13 percent. More than 11.6 million adults in America became a victim of identity theft, according to Javelin Strategy & Research.

Should you pay for an identity theft service? Protection can include monitoring bank account and credit card activity, the use of your Social Security number, assistance in restoring your identity and more. "For about $10 a month, they are worth it," says www.IDTheftSecurity.com CEO Robert Siciliano.

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Are there days when you wish you could just disappear from the Internet? Maybe you're haunted by things you've said on social networks, or you're just sick of having companies track and catalog your every move.

Yeah, it'd be nice to pull the plug on the whole thing, but it would be easier to stop a runaway train, right? Actually, it's not terribly difficult to pull the Internet equivalent of escaping to a deserted island. All it takes is time and tenacity.

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