can someone who is not the police etc. easily track down all your net activities, your Google searches just based on the ip address you have (e.g. in an email header)? No, I haven't been downloading kiddy porn but i'm just wondering can the average person easily breach your privacy completely? or would that require a keylogger or some program actually installed on your computer itself?

Lucie, you should know all about this kind of thing.

hm.

it depends how careful you are when you browse.

software will make it a lot more easy, but there is also the risk of "social engineering", that is to say, for example, someone pretending to be who they are not, or otherwise gaining the confidence of a person who would have access, and simply..asking for, or taking it.

very little you do online is private. it is all logged somewhere. just...keep that in mind.

you can use "anonymisers", such as Vidalia, Tor and Privoxy, but... to my knowledge they tend to be a little slower.

It probably would require them to install a program on your computer for most things.

There's some ways to find out little things - for example, if you go to a webpage, then navigate to a new page, an exit script on the first page can save the address of the second page. To get anything in detail though, a program would need to look at the actual files on your computer.

The most common way to spy or keylog someone is to use a link that, without you knowing about it, downloads and installs a hidden program that then logs whatever information the hacker wants. Be very careful with links on forums.

These programs are also often hidden in shared files, if you download alot, it's best to use torrents and a good torrent tracker, programs like limewire or kazaa are the worst.

thanks guys! this is all very interesting...

http://www.abika.com/Reports/verifyemail.htm

Now a site like the above says they can
scan the public internet and returns a list of possible Names, email addresses, email accounts, website usernames and Instant Messenger Names associated with a particular IP address in the last three years.

So i guess that's the biggie. for example if someone knows im interested in Neurodiversity and gets a whole bunch of usernames from websites about Neurodiversity, then it'd pretty easy to find out that was me. How do they scan for the above anyway and how easy is it to achieve?

If you're worried about this kind of thing and can cope the the downsides of ip maskers (pages showing up in foreign languages, slower load times) tor button is a decent firefox addon to add another layer of security. Still this is high tech, most stalkers are little angry kids who's skill extends no further than reading profiles and using google. I'm usually impressed if they can pull my ip from a messenger conversation and punch it into a locator. If you are getting the attention of real techs then you either need to hire a security consultant or become one.