In the online world, anonymity and privacy are increasingly disappearing, which makes me recall the line from the movie, The Hunt for Red October, “Privacy is not of major concern in the Soviet Union, comrade. It is often contrary to the collective good.”

If we keep relinquishing our personal data to companies, we lose our privacy and individual space, which I highly doubt will be good for our collective good. Even if we have nothing to hide, we lose control over our own lives when big business can stalk us and manipulate our behavior. Whether or not we actually have any control over anything anyways in the grand scheme of life is another issue and best left for spiritual debates.

As we go about our days on and off-line, we are sometimes responsible for disclosing information ourselves and at other times, information is being gathered about us without our knowledge. Let’s consider the recent instance where customer data gathered by Target determined that a high school girl would likely benefit from their coupons for pregnancy related items since her purchases matched those of expecting women’s baby registries. The situation becomes interesting when it turns out that the girl’s father was not even aware that his daughter was pregnant and logged a complaint with the store. He later apologized to the store when it turned out that his daughter was in fact expecting. Target had been right on target; her buying habits indicated she was pregnant and the company’s algorithm responded accordingly.

While stores are gathering our information from our credit cards and online behavior, social media sites, such as Google+ and Facebook, are sharing their huge repositories of personal data with other companies. For example, Hulu now requires users to link their Facebook accounts to the Hulu accounts, an action which makes having separate online identities less possible. Google+ is set up to gather information about browser search habits and will customize your results based on your profile and even that of your friends if you happen to be logged in.

Further troubling is the location services feature on mobile phones, which determines an exact user location. While it is handy for finding a nearby vegan place in a new neighborhood, it is quite troubling to think that Google knows my exact location, eating preferences and travel habits throughout the week.

After considering the above described examples you may want to take steps to reclaim your privacy and stop the invasion in its tracks.

Here are a few things you can do:

1) Don’t use the same search engine provider as your email provider. If you use gmail or Google+, then don’t use Google to browse when logged in to that account.

2) Try using non-tracking search engines such as: DuckDuckGo, which had a no tracking policy and will not give you results based on your search history. Or, you can install browser add-ons, such as Ghostery and Do Not Track Plus, which do not allow tracking companies to have access to your information. If you have a lot of time, you can use Tor, which is a service that working by encrypting your data stream and moves the data around  through multiple proxy servers so that the origin of the data is unknown.

3) Hide your IP Address by using a proxy server such as WiTopia, PrivateVPN and StrongVPN. Proxy servers remove your IP address when transferring data across the internet, which hides your identity from both your ISP and from any websites with that you may be visiting.

4) Use the privacy settings on your social media accounts. Do not publish your phone number or address online. Don’t use Four Square or share your location on any of your social media profiles. That person you met at a party last week and friended on Facebook, might decide to rob your house after seeing your posting about spending the weekend in Vegas or that you and your best friend are having pizza at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

The bottom line is that you need to play a little hard-to-get with your personal information and don’t over share online if you want to maintain privacy. If you open the borders to your personal life you can guarantee big business will march on in. And, whether or not Google is good for the collective good, remains to be seen.