Opera again showcased the growth of the mobile web with today’s installment of its monthly report of Opera Mini usage, but in a world where web-friendly smartphones are gaining traction its data may be getting stale. While there’s no doubt that Opera Mini has amassed a huge following, it’s unclear how instructive the company’s statistics are when it comes to overall mobile web usage.

Mini is a great alternative for feature phones and other handsets with inferior embedded browsers, but as AdMob pointed out again last month, iPhones and other high-tech smartphones with advanced browsers are driving a huge amount of traffic on the mobile web. Opera is running neck-and-neck with the iPhone in the mobile browser market, according to StatCounter Global Stats.

“I think in a way (Opera’s statistics) mirrors overall mobile web usage very well,” Assev said. “This is proving that there is just one web. As long as you can access the Internet, it doesn’t matter which device you are using; you’re just going to the same pages that you would go to on a computer.”

It’s All About Google

However, as long as we take the results with a grain of salt, there are some interesting data points hidden in this month’s report.  Google proved once again that it is the destination of choice for users of the popular mobile browser. Google — or a localized version thereof — ranked in the top 10 most visited sites in Opera Mini’s top 10 international markets in September, and was the most popular site for Mini users in the U.S. and India. Facebook also was popular among Mini users, ranking as the top destination in Great Britain and South Africa and the second-most popular in the U.S.

In the serious world of high-tech executives, Jon von Tetzchner stands out as a refreshingly irreverent leader. The Icelandic-born CEO of Opera Software — who in 2005 comically attempted to swim from Norway to the U.S. as a public-relations stunt — preaches the company’s vision of “One Web” that would deliver a full Internet experience to people regardless of whether they access online content with a desktop, a mobile computer or a wireless phone. It’s a goal Opera continues to work toward with its mobile and PC browsers and with Opera Unite, a new technology that aims to turn PCs — and, eventually, cell phones — into servers that let users share content with others via the browser.

In the edited interview below, Tetzchner, a speaker at this week’s Mobilize 09 in San Francisco, offers his thoughts via e-mail on the U.S. mobile market, the evolution of phone browsers, and the effect app stores will have on the space.

Colin Gibbs: Opera Mini has gained astounding traction worldwide, surpassing 25 million downloads via GetJar alone, but it seems most of that uptake is coming from markets outside North America. How is Opera Mini faring in the U.S., and what kind of movement can we expect in the next year?

Jon von Tetzchner: Opera Mini is doing quite well in the U.S. — the U.S. is on the top 10 list for countries using Opera Mini. However, it is also visible that Opera Mini is not reaching as wide in the U.S. as in other countries. As an example, the top 10 phone list is dominated by RIM. The reason for this is that a data plan is needed in the U.S. to use data services (and not in other countries to the same extent, as a limited data plan is included by default). I believe Opera Mini will become a very popular player in the year to come, directly and through our partners such as Sprint and Virgin Mobile.

Gibbs: Opera Mini has effectively turned millions of feature phones into web-friendly devices, but how will the browser evolve in relation to the more powerful Opera Mobile as smartphone usage continues to ramp up?

Tetzchner: Both browsers will continue to get more powerful, and both are able to run on smartphones and feature phones. Opera Mini is getting a lot of traction, and we believe it will continue to do so. Opera Mobile has been getting Turbo, and that makes Opera Mobile also work very well on limited networks. Users and our partners will have two good choices to choose between.

Gibbs: Webkit continues to gain traction on smartphones and will surely increase its momentum in the wake of RIM’s acquisition of Torch Mobile. Do you see Webkit as a competitor or as a complementary solution, and what do you believe are Opera’s differentiators?

Tetzchner: The mobile market used to have a lot of browsers — a lot of WAP browsers — but these are now increasingly being replaced by Opera and sometimes a Webkit-based browser. I think it is clear that the market wants a choice in browsers. There is clearly room for more than one, and we will be making sure that we continue to provide innovation faster in the market.

Gibbs: What role do you see mobile playing in Opera Unite? What kind of user experience do you envision?

Tetzchner: I do believe Opera Unite will play a major role in mobile and in general. It is only natural that every device has the capability to both consume and serve data and services. On the mobile, a typical example of a Unite service would be the Photo Sharing service. Many photos on mobile phones never leave it. Opera Unite opens up to easy sharing of photos with your friends, without having to upload them or send them over MMS. Convenience is the key here, as always.

Gibbs: How do you plan to lure developers to Opera Unite given all the new mobile platforms available to build on?

Tetzchner: The web is the platform of choice in the world today. Nothing comes close. Web developers are discovering more and more that they can make some great apps using web technology, and as part of that, widgets are taking off. Opera Unite services are basically widgets. Any widgets developer (read: web designer) can easily make an Opera Unite service. Any Unite service will work with any Unite-enabled Opera browser and can be accessed with any modern browser. That is some serious reach.

Gibbs: How will the ever-increasing number of app stores coming to market affect Opera, and how do you plan to exploit the new distribution channels?

Tetzchner: As you mention, these stores can be a distribution channel for Opera. In addition to that, we are enabling stores by providing Opera with Widgets as a way to run apps and sometimes even helping make the stores.

There are a lot of brave souls out there making mobile browsers, hoping to gain traction with the phone makers. But most of them are fighting a losing battle, for the mobile browser war is increasingly being fought between two camps — the Webkit-based browsers camp, which includes Safari on the iPhone, the Google Android Browser, the Palm browser and the Nokia browser; and the Opera camp.

Today Research in Motion bought Touch Mobile, a Toronto-based company developing a Webkit-based mobile browser. Maybe it’s time for Microsoft to throw in the towel and officially get on the Webkit bandwagon as well. With the BlackBerry still the reigning champion of the smartphone business, at least in North America, the Webkit is about to get a big boost. Even Mozilla’s Firefox Mobile has an uphill climb ahead, though one can’t blame them for trying. Many mobile industry insiders believe that the browser is one of the biggest drivers of the mobile Internet boom.

Frankly, I can’t wait for my BlackBerry Tour to get some browser smarts and become more useful than its current role of just a solid messaging device.

It’s been a month since browser maker Opera announced Opera Unite to much fanfare, and it’s about time for a reality check: Its users have been struggling to access the browser’s new server functions in recent days, with file-sharing services unavailable and personal web pages returning server errors. At fault is Unite’s proxy architecture, which was supposed to make networking your browser easier, but has been unreliable at best. Add to this the fact that personal Unite pages have been showing up on Google, and you start to wonder what Opera really meant when it claimed to “reinvent the web” with Unite — start from scratch with a shaky architecture and unresolved privacy issues, just like in the early ’90s?

Opera Unite offers users an easy way to share files and host web sites on their own PC through the Opera browser, and the platform can be extended with third-party services. Unite uses proxy servers to make these services available to the world, even if you’re behind a firewall, and the service offers its users permanent URLs that are resolved through Opera’s proxy servers. In other words: Your notebook running Opera with Unite will always be available at an address like http://notebook.youraddress.operaunite.com, even if you drag it from the office to the coffee shop.

Problem is, these proxy servers haven’t been working. Unite users have been complaining about frequent disconnects for at least two weeks, and the situation seems to have gone downhill from there. Not only was I not able to keep a persistent connection to Unite on multiple test machines for more than a few minutes in recent days, I also couldn’t find a single Unite service on other users’ machines up and running. Even the suggested links to other users within Unite resulted in error messages.

Opera finally admitted to these issues in a blog post yesterday, stating that “this has been largely due to our Unite proxy acting funny.” However, the post doesn’t say anything about how long it will take to resolve these problems, and Opera didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Connection problems aren’t the only issues that have come up in the month since Unite’s launch. Transforming your browser into a publicly available server also has huge privacy implications, one of them being that Google indexes these pages just as if they were any other web site. So far, around 1,300 Unite pages show up in Google’s index. Some of them are password-protected, but Google’s robots were able to access password-protected shared media pages in at least a handful of cases. One also has to wonder whether users really understand that making their home PC’s photos available without a password means those snapshots will be part of the Google Images index as well.

A third-party developer has come up with a Unite extension that utilizes a simple robots.txt file to block Google and others from indexing pages. It may be a good idea to make this a default feature of Unite, but Opera may be hesitant to do so because it would hurt the product’s visibility.

To be fair, Opera Unite is still in alpha, and one can’t expect everything to work 100 percent from day one. However, the proxy issues hint at more substantial architectural challenges: Opera is reinventing the web with its own servers as a single point of failure, and the fact that it can’t keep up with a small number of early adopters makes you wonder whether Unite will ever be ready for mass adoption.

Image from the Opera Unite developer’s primer.

Opera Software today is trumpeting its new technology offering called Opera Unite that uses the Opera browser to turn your PC into a server that can host photos, files, music, and even act as a Facebook-style wall for exchanging notes and chats. The idea is similar to services such as FolderShare that allow you to share the contents of your PC with another computer, only this time Opera is doing it via the browser instead of a separate client. It works on Windows, Linux and Mac machines, and will likely work with Opera Mini and Opera Mobile at a later date.

Opera users can access Opera Unite through a drop-down menu and then log into their Opera account. From there, they can let the browser know which files to share and what privacy settings to use. The program also offers up a URL that friends and family who don’t use Opera can paste into their browsers to see the shared files. It’s handy, but for it to work, the browser needs to be on and the computer has to be awake. That limits the sharing somewhat, much like it did on previous efforts with this type of file sharing.

To make this new, Opera takes the idea of a browser-based web server and is trying to create a platform for developers to build more applications using that functionality. The initial six apps are file sharing, music, photo sharing, notes, hosting a web page, and a private chat room to share among all your friends. It’s good that Opera has built in the capability to share files and services with non-Opera users since over at ZDNet, Larry Dignan says that at max only 2 percent of the web browsing population is using Opera.

And that will be Opera’s biggest challenge — attracting developers to come up with cool applications on this service when they could be building for the iPhone, the Pre, Android or any of the other platforms out there. Opera Unite shows how cool interactivity on the web can be (and by shoving it into the browser, Opera should be able to take it mobile on a variety of devices), but it’s just another platform trying to be a king in a world where developers are now the kingmakers.

Opera Software today said it has a deal with location data provider Skyhook Wireless to bring geolocation to its browser. Users can choose to share their location with any web site and get information about related products and services in their vicinity. Web site developers use a newly launched API to build location awareness into their sites. Opera’s singing a familiar tune with this deal as Mozilla has a similar pact with Skyhook and Yahoo is doing the same thing with its Fire Eagle efforts.

In exactly 14 hours, at 9 am PST, you will be able to download the Internet Explorer 8.0 browser, Microsoft’s response to Firefox, Chrome and Safari, from the company’s web site. The release is a tactical acknowledgment by Redmond, Wash.-based software giant that it’s locked in a bitter battle for market share with Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari browsers.

So far it’s been on the losing side of the equation, ceding market share to its upstart rivals, all of whom are touting ease of use, simplicity, security and speed. Microsoft’s browser chief, Mike Nash, thinks the new IE 8.0 has got all that and more. While many of the new features in this browser are available to users of Safari and Firefox (via plugins), Microsoft is offering a comprehensive package — sans download — for a majority of the people that continue to patronize IE.Nash was particularly excited about the new security feature of the browser that protects browser users via a reputation system. Of course, security is IE’s own Achilles’ heel, so this upgrade is just part of doing business, in my view. IE8 also has a new featured called Accelerator that allows you to select words on the web site and then get relevant information from eBay, Facebook and various mapping services. Among other features in the new release that are expected to appeal to the masses: “save and restore” and “web clippings” functions.

Will that be enough for Microsoft to stop the bleeding? Yes. I say that because the company has the distinct advantage of being able to push the changes to its audience, as many of them are unwilling to consider anything beyond the default “E” on their desktop. We all know someone like that ☺. To millions of Microsoft windows users, IE 8 upgrades will come as a breath of fresh air and prevent them from searching for an alternative. At least in the near term!

I think if Microsoft had to compete on an equal footing with, say, Firefox, its market share would be much lower. IE’s share of the browser market was down to 67.4 percent as of the end of February while Mozilla’s Firefox had risen to 21.8 percent and Apple’s Safari to 8 percent, according to web browser tracking firm Net Applications.

Browser market share data published earlier this month by Net Applications regarding Opera Software’s desktop browser is “plain wrong,” Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO of the software company, told me today. He was responding to questions about the report’s conclusion, that Opera’s desktop browser market share was stagnating in the face of more competition from not only Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer but Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. It did seem like an awfully sharp reversal for a company that has not only thrived as an independent but has developed a cult following, as I noted in an article for Business 2.0 back in 2005.

Market Share

“Net Applications said that we had no growth in 2008,” von Tetzchner went on, “but internally we saw a 67 percent increase in the number of desktop users and a significant rise in revenues.” He said Opera has 35 million active users, which translates into between “2 and 3 percent” market share when it comes to desktop browsers. So why the disparity? “Much of our growth is in emerging markets like India, Indonesia and Russia — and that doesn’t show up in stats,” he explained. “Net Applications is looking at data that is mostly in the U.S. and parts of Western Europe.”

He claimed to see similar misreporting in the mobile browser market share as well (according to von Tetzchner, the Opera Mini is the most popular mobile browser). But it’s the way people have begun to frame all mobile browser conversations around smartphones that really perplexes him. What many fail to remember, he pointed out, is that more than 85 percent of the world’s phones are not “smartphones.”

Smart or not, there are billions of phones out there. With only 21 million active Opera Mini browser users — and more traditional WAP browser competitors like Open Wave, Access and Telica falling off the cliff — von Tetzchner thinks there is plenty of room for Opera to grow. “There is a mega-trend of increased Internet usage and we are in the middle of it, regardless of the economic downturn.”

I’m glad he’s feeling confident, because his company has some serious challenges ahead of it: It’s competing with the same companies it counts among its business partners, such as Google and Nokia. One misstep and Opera could be locked out of much-needed revenues.

The iPhone Effect

As for that mega-trend of increased Internet usage von Tetzchner talked about, he credits the iPhone. “What the iPhone did was make people want a full browser for their phones, and we have that,” von Tetzchner said. At the same time, he called the iPhone “an interesting platform but not a very large platform. So we are going for other market segments.” It could be sour grapes — Apple isn’t, after all, allowing Opera to be sold on the iPhone. Then again, I personally think the iPhone has more of an “influence” on the direction of the mobile industry than most mobile providers would like to admit.

Unsurprisingly, von Tetzchner is not a fan of app stores, believing they are yet another attempt to fragment the market. “We are seeing a lot of widget implementations that are not standardized and don’t work together,” he said. He thinks that eventually all these widgets will converge to a common standard, allowing, say, iPhone apps work on Android and Android on Windows Mobile, etc.

I’m not so sure the end user actually gives a damn if an app works on one platform and not on another. Once you are locked into a two-year contract with your phone, what are the odds that you are switching to another one? Plus these apps are so cheap that many of us would simply download them again anyway. The problem is for the application writers, who have to develop their apps for many different platforms. For von Tetzchner that alone is a reason to believe that standards-based mobile widgets (apps) will eventually happen.

Newly christened HipLogic, which was formerly known as Numobiq, today launched a software development kit for its cell phone virtualization platform. The company’s product demo looks like several other mobile phone personalization efforts, but is actually a virtual machine running on top of the existing mobile operating system. The end goal, according to Mark Young, HipLogic’s CTO and founder, is to create applications that can truly interact with phones and each other, bringing the same level of functionality to millions of other phones as the iPhone has and the Android will.

So far, it’s hard to judge how successful the three-year-old HipLogic will be with its mission, but it raised $4.5 million last January from Benchmark Capital and has ported its Java-based virtual machine to the Windows, Linux, S60 and UIQ mobile operating systems (BREW and RIM will be next). Developers can write applications for the HipLogic virtual machine and have them run on any phones using those operating systems, provided the phone has the HipMobile virtual machine loaded on it.

Young says the company will announce applications as well as a download for consumers in the first quarter of next year. Until then he’s being tight-lipped about whether the company has signed any operators as customers, as well as who might offer content on the HipLogic platform.

Other companies intent on bringing virtualization to mobile phones include Adobe with its Flash efforts, Opera, and startup VirtualLogix. (Adobe with its Flash Lite efforts and Opera have similar designs using their own technologies.) Since virtualization helps make the more than 1 billion mobile phones out there that aren’t smartphones behave more like smartphones, it’s a promising area for consumers intent on getting more features, and carriers hoping for more data revenue.

Just in time for Halloween, Opera, the makers of one of my favorite mobile browsers, is announcing MAMA, a research project designed to show people the gooey icky insides of web pages. It may be a small niche of people who care how many pages use Flash (33.5 percent), or how many sites use cascading style sheets (80.39 percent), but that doesn’t mean that widespread use of such a tool won’t help end users. MAMA began as a research project aimed at tracking more URLs than previous web page categorization efforts, and will eventually open to the public as a search engine.

It’s relevant information for those who build web sites, for example, to know how many web pages use AJAX (3.2 percent); ditto for the folks who build browsers. By using MAMA, which stands for Metadata Analysis and Mining Application, they will see that the majority of web sites still use tables and ensure that their browsers render accordingly. And that means we all get a similar web experience across an array of operating systems, browsers and devices. With more and more applications and services being delivered via the web, access to such a knowledge base could come in handy.

MySpace launched a social networking experience designed for the iPhone (available free at the App Store) today that will take advantage of the touch interface. As part of the launch, they sent out a fact sheet detailing some mobile stats that I found pretty compelling, notably that of MySpace’s 115 million members, up to 5 million are expected to use the mobile site by the end of the year, with 3.1 million using it now. And most of those users come through MySpace’s mobile web site rather than through an on-deck, carrier-supplied link.

This highlights two trends for mobile: One, the waning influence of carriers and the subsequent need for an on-deck application; and two, the rise of social networking on mobile phones. The first has been well established with successful applications such as Opera Mini and other downloadable web browsers, as well as the choice by many mobile application developers to deliver their services through a browser rather than a client on the phone. Carriers aren’t giving up their influence, but expect to see the more forward-thinking among them doing deals to buy apps makers, which will make their influence less obvious, but leave a revenue stream intact.

The second trend is something I’ve previously doubted, but now realize I was simply too old and not social enough to believe. The number of existing MySpace users, however, convinced me (even though Opera already released tallies that showed MySpace.com as the most-visited mobile site in the U.S. and Facebook as No. 5). And the numbers are backed up by data that iSuppli released earlier this week that concluded, “Though there have not been any successful implementations of wireless social networking to date, the widespread adoption of mobile Internet devices like the iPhone will spur an entirely new generation of wireless social networking businesses and business models starting in 2009.”

As consumers embrace location-based services, a social element will naturally come into play. The use of open APIs at many social networks makes using the mobile phone as your social network easier and allows for services like the new social phone book from Zyb. Plus, social networking via mobile makes more sense once the interface gets easier. After all, you’re often away from the computer for hours and when in front of one, likely are focused on work or completing a task. But the mobile is a fun device, on which taking a few seconds to update your status or answer a quick email can easily be worked into daily activities. The phone will continue to keep folks connected.

The New York Times, earlier this week pointed out that browser wars had erupted again with Mozilla Corp’s Firefox, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari looking to one-up each other. While that certainly is true, the browser wars on the desktop are not as interesting as the sudden explosion of interest in the browsers on mobile devices. With billions of devices sold every year there is a big demand for mobile browsers. The market is an emergent one, with no real winners.

WebKit-based browsers on S60 and Apple’s iPhone are strong contenders. In addition, Mozilla is looking to develop mobile browser for phones that are based on Linux OS, as CEO John Lilly said in a chat with us earlier this month. They are all fighting it out with Opera of Norway. I have Opera Mini on my Blackberry Curve and I love it.

However, all these players should watch out for Skyfire, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that went into private beta earlier this year. The company is about to announce that it has raised $13 million in Series B funding from Lightspeed Ventures previously investors, Trinity Ventures and Matrix Partners. The company has raised $17.8 million thus far.

What makes Skyfire so special? It has a mobile browser that can render regular web pages almost perfectly like the way you expect to see them on your desktop. Only Apple’s iPhone version of Safari has that kind of ability. However, Skyfire’s server centric approach allows it to render Flash-based content such as YouTube videos on mobile devices. That makes this browser really useful. While Skyfire works only on Windows Mobile platform, the company is hard at work on a Symbian version. I have seen an early stage demo and it works very well. When I saw this browser for the first time, my initial reaction was: Microsoft should buy this company and replace their lousy Mobile IE with this much nicer product. It would instantly make HTC devices usable.

On a more macro level, everyone in the mobile ecosystem – from handset makers to mobile carriers – is interested in a mobile browser, that can render web pages for view on the handset without writing special versions of the web content. Apple’s iPhone showed that a good browser (married to easy to use experience) can raise demand for data services. With Voice-related revenues peaking, mobile carriers are increasingly banking on demand for mobile data services to make money, as we have noted previously. According to UBS Research analysis, wireless data services “now account for 21% of total service revenues for the major carriers, up from 16% a year ago.”

In a recent report, mobile market research firm, M:Metrics pointed out that among smartphone users in the United States, mobile browsing has increased 89% year over year, and pageviews have increased 127 percent. More importantly, the time people are spending on non iPhone mobile phones based web browsers is increasing as well. Mobile advertising start-up, AdMob had come to similar conclusions when it analyzed the data it collected from its ad-network.

Against such a backdrop, it is not difficult to see why VCs want to take a flyer on a company like Skyfire. Sure it has its risks including fighting with deep pocketed incumbents, but the upside is big as well. As I said, it is early days in the mobile browser wars.

Mobile browsing has clearly moved beyond 9-to-5 users and made inroads among the happy hour set. A recent survey by Opera showed about 40 percent (and about 60 percent in the United States, South Africa and Indonesia) of Opera Mini users visit social networking sites when surfing on a mobile. For those unfamiliar with the Opera Mini browser, it allows a user to see an entire web page and zoom in on desired content as long as they have Java on the phone.

The survey also shows which top 10 sites surfers visited in each country. The U.S. list begins with MySpace and ends with eBay. In between socializing and shopping is more socializing through Hi5 and Facebook, as well as search via Google, Microsoft Live and Yahoo. It looks like even if we aren’t using our phones for talking, we’re still using them to connect — and to settle bar bets. Wikipedia is the No. 8 slot in the United States. As the chart below shows, if users have an easy way to access the web on their mobiles they will. Carriers and device makers take note!

Amount of Data Consumed in MB by Opera Mini Users

More smartphones means more mobile browsers, and Web Worker Daily has a rundown on several, including the latest effort from Mozilla, the guys behind the wildly popular Firefox browser. So check it out, and see if Opera Mini or Apple’s Safari browser is for you. It’s like its 1995 all over again.

As privacy issues continue to monopolize our national conversation, sparked by everything from Google’s proposed takeover of DoubleClick to Facebook’s Beacon advertising platform to warrantless wiretapping by the NSA and various other activities that bring to mind tinfoil hats and black helicopters, I’ve started to wonder: How does one attain some semblance of privacy on the Internet? For while I can live with the fact that national security concerns may warrant some invasion of privacy at some point, I am not comfortable giving up personal information as to how I think for the sake of companies and their marketing departments serving me relevant advertising.

I know I am a part of a specific targeted demographic and I realize that marketers value, above all, the ability to understanding the basic incentives of targeted demographics. Further, I realize that it is exceptionally difficult to live in society today without being classified for marketing purposes – i.e. I am a male living in Silicon Valley and working in venture capital– and that this practice has been done for years via credit card purchases, mortgage information and other sources of data. What bothers me is that gathering my personal data gives marketers access to my personal habits, which they can then analyze in an attempt to understand why I do what I do and use their conclusions to serve me up [what they hope is] more relevant advertising. And what scares me is that some people call this a feature and are willing to grant access to their private digital footprint in return for this so-called relevant advertising.

To borrow an example from a friend of mine, I don’t care if my local grocery chain store knows that skirt steak and Corona beer are usually purchased together by males between 24 and 42 years of age. However, I do care if a search engine company knows that I purchased these items at the grocery chain store at four in the afternoon on Saturday, recently bought a round-trip ticket to Argentina and returned an item to the Macy’s in Union Square last weekend. Do they serve my needs any better by inserting advertising for Niman Ranch beef, hotel discounts in Buenos Aires and Macy’s latest sale on my Facebook page? I understand why, in terms of advertising rates, this is good for Facebook, but why am I giving up my privacy for this service?

So here are some ways to regain a reasonable facsimile of privacy on the Internet — or at least attempt to give marketers the most limited amount of personal information possible. Some of these are fairly practical and easily accomplished while others, admittedly, are way off the fairway and only for the serious privacy advocates and full-blown conspiracy theorists.

Feeling Practical But Not Paranoid?

Do not use desktop search tools like Google Desktop or Microsoft Desktop Search. A full index of every keyword on your hard drive in the hands of marketers is very useful for the purposes of targeted advertising.

Do not use webmail from a service provider like AT&T, Google or Microsoft. Same reason as above, except here it applies to every email you send or receive.

Do not use browser toolbars or desktop gadgets. Both of these types of add-ons from companies like Yahoo and Google are known to gather information on your online activity for marketing purposes.

Remove all social network accounts. There is loads of good information there that can be used for targeting and correlation. At the very least, remove all personal information and have a username that does not give any clues to your true identity.

Clear your browser cookies after every session. Alternatively, only search using Ask.com and enable AskEraser. To take erasing your footprint a step further, do not accept any browser cookies by default. This additional step will make web surfing slower and more intrusive as you will have to manually accept or deny cookies. That being said, if you surf for an hour without accepting cookies by default you will become much more aware of them, and that in and of itself could prove enlightening.

Change your local username daily. Browsers and other software have been known to pass local usernames to servers as part of their operation. If your username is something like “first.lastname” this is clearly useful information for data collection purposes.

Use Opera. With Opera, you can mimic another browser’s identification string, which helps mask your browser’s settings and reduces the information that you send to a web site when you visit.

Paranoid and Happy to Admit It:

Do not make international phone calls. Even if warrantless wiretapping by the NSA does not concern you, you need to be aware of Echelon.

Do not have a home broadband connection. If you have a home broadband connection, a network service provider can map your name to your IP address to your physical location. Again, your name, where you live and your Internet activity is all useful information for marketers.

Use free Wi-Fi. If you don’t have a home broadband connection but you will still want to be connected, find a free wireless access point at a local coffee shop. To further hide your existence, every time your computer associates with a wireless access point, manually change your MAC address.

Install a host-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) like OSSEC. Assuming that you are already using a personal firewall, anti-spam and anti-spy software, a host-based IDS will ensure your computer isn’t being used without your knowledge. For an additional level of security, you could block all Internet traffic except for HTTP (port 80) and then log and trap anything else.

If you’re not satisfied being paranoid and want to venture into the land of Ted Kaczynski, you should give up on email, not have a home phone, use a pre-paid mobile phone that you change frequently, get all of your physical mail at a P.O. box and do every transaction (including buying a home or cabin in the woods) with cash.

But perhaps you want to live in our society, write on popular blogs — even have a public profile. I do, which means that I have a public presence for marketers to analyze. But I also follow most of the practical advice that I give above, because the only way to maintain a semblance of privacy on the Internet is to take responsibility for guarding your information – to whatever degree you see fit.