This is the first in a series of blog posts debunking some common misunderstandings about online privacy. The images used in these posts have been adapted from a tutorial given by Gerald Friedland at ACM Multimedia in Nara, Japan in October.

If you think that browsing online is anonymous, think again: nothing online is completely private. For example, search engines and Web sites can collect information about you -- this is how targeted advertising works. Your browsing history is used to tailor ads to your interests, as perceived by the search engine based on which sites you spent time looking at. It follows that many sites you visit could be collecting information about other sites you visit, which means that the simple act of reading something online is not guaranteed to be private.