Information is money and you're giving it away!

Internet security is back in the news as ad tracking companies apparently circumvented Safari's privacy settings and uploaded users contact lists to their servers without their permission.

This affects all Safari users on all platforms including Apples iOS devices.

I run a fairly tight ship when it comes to internet security so here are my recommendations for safe web browsing.
I run Mozilla Firefox as my primary browser believing it to be more secure than IE and very stable.
I've played around with Chrome and I use Safari on my iPhone.
Firefox has a great selection of 'add-ons' so you start with the basic setup and add the things you want from their website.
The first add-on you want to grab off the Firefox website is "No Script".
This little baby allows websites on a page by page basis.
In fact element by element. You can choose to allow only certain parts of a website to run.
Often a web page will be made up from all different sources combined into one cohesive page.
No Script allows you to see all the various sources and allow or disallow them by 'friendly name' IP.
So if the content I want to view on CNN.com is the news part but I don't care about seeing their ads which come from their ad server, I can block them and just see the news part. Brilliant!
If you come across a malicious web page that runs scripts as soon as you land on it, chances are you'll get infected immediately.
No Script has all scripts off by default and then it's up to your judgement whether you should allow a page to run its scripts. So it's not entirely foolproof!
Another plus is I can open several youtube tabs at a time and by disallowing youtube.com in the No Script options, the videos won't all simultaneously start playing. I can go to each tab and allow just that video to play then move to the next one and do the same. This works on any website with streaming content.
I've been using No Script for a couple of years now and I wouldn't not use it.
It requires you to be more aware of what various parts of a web page are doing but that's a good thing and as it's all off by default, you have maximum protection from 'drive-by' hijackings!

The BBC's tech program Click featured another add-on for Firefox recently called "Do Not Track Plus" from security company abine.com.
The ad tracking story had just broken and so I checked out what this thing does.
Besides 'third party cookies' that track your web browsing and target advertising towards your apparent demographic, there are other ways of data scraping most people aren't aware of.
"Social Buttons" like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc allow the website you are visiting to share that information with these companies. So if you're logged in to facebook and decide to look at other websites, that is being tracked. The friendly facebook icon on that page is coded in such a way, no cookie is required.
Then there's the inevitable ad farming companies that show up all the time like doubleclick, and google analytics. The more popular a website, the more likely it is 'affiliated' with other data sharers.
Besides all this happening without you even realising it. Despite companies growing rich by selling on your information while you blissfully enter personal data into web forms on a redirected site in Latvia, there are serious privacy issues involved.
A lot of this information collected is apparently 'anonymous' but not all of it.
And break-ins are to be expected.
Hackers are getting more sophisticated and backed by huge money.
If we can encrypt it, someone will work out how to unencrypt it.
In the meantime, Do Not Track Plus stops all data sharing on every page you visit.
None of these are important to the viewing of the page.
In fact for each IP that has to be contacted it costs a few miliseconds.
These data trackers are slowing you down!

I also run Avira anti-virus and Comodo firewall on my computer and have automatic updates set for each.
Both are great free products that will save you a lot of angst from a virus, trojan or worm.
You should never connect to a network without anti-virus and a good firewall already set up.
The threats are real and in a test I read recently, it took as little as 17 seconds for an unprotected machine to be infected by automated port sniffing bots.