Look for a privacy seal. These seals, which are a recent innovation, give assurance that a Web site is abiding by its posted privacy policy. BBBOnLine (a subsidiary of the Council of Better Business Bureaus) and TRUSTe seals provide a mechanism to handle complaints by consumers who feel their privacy has been violated. The seals also mean a company has instituted systems for practicing what it preaches about privacy protection. If you don't find a seal at a Web site, write to the site and ask for one.

Do not under any circumstances give your password to anyone. Hackers and scammers often try to entice you to give you password through a variety of tricks. Be careful. Use different passwords at different Web sites and change your passwords every now and then.

Use a secure browser that complies with an industry security standard, such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) that encrypts or scrambles purchase information.

Other "privacy" products work in different ways. Some of these are available free and many can be downloaded. Here is a partial list of those that are available now or expected to be offered in the next few months.

Infomediaries, a new and relatively untested technology, allow you to exercise choice in what sorts of personal information is shared at each site you visit. They require that you create a detailed personal profile to enable the technology to negotiate the release of personal information on your behalf.

Services also exist for removing your name from online mailing lists and directories. Get more information from: www.junkbusters.com, <HELP@INFOUSA.COM and help@bigfoot.com.

Anonymizer products include:

Anonymizer, one of the best-known and oldest products, allows you to surf anonymously. It also offers anonymous email and Net access. Visit www.anonymizer.com.

Freedom from the Canadian company, Zero Knowledge Systems, will charge $50 a year to provide up to five online aliases and allow anonymous profiles. Because the Montreal-based company does not have to follow U.S. law, Freedom can use stronger encryption than similar American products. Not even Zero Knowledge can trace surfing, posting or chat room visits back to the user. It will be available later this spring.

The Onion routing system, under development by the Naval Research Laboratory, keeps third parties from tracking your surfing activities by randomly routing messages through a series of routers before the message reaches its destination.

Among the new infomediary products being offered are:

DigitalMe, a software product that will be available soon from Novell, stores your personal information and uses it to automatically fill out forms at Web sites, letting you review them before they are submitted. The software, available by download in June, will keep track of your passwords and names used from site to site. Check out the new product at www.digitalme.com.

Jotter, a new desktop tool bar, allows you to employ an automatic form for shopping online, reminds you of your IDs and passwords and locates privacy policies on Web sites so that you can see how a company or organization handles personal data. Information on the new product can be found at www.jotter.com.

The software can be downloaded free from the Web site.

Lumeria hides individually identifiable data and then allows you to charge companies to see it. This California-based company believes that if personal information is valuable to businesses then they should pay for it. Information on the product can be found at www.lumeria.com. The free portion of the new service can place you on a "do not contact" list for direct marketers. Lumeria also allows you to surf anonymously by providing inaccurate "cookie" information to Web sites.

Secure Electronic Transfer Transaction (SET) works by using encryption to safeguard your credit card information while it's traveling over the Web. It also uses digital signatures to ensure the identity of both you and the merchant. One advantage of SET is that your credit card number is not stored in the merchant's browser.

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) creates a secure connection for transmitting documents and information such as credit card numbers over the Internet. It is fast and easy for Web sites to set up. SSL may become the accepted standard for Web based transactions that require a high degree of security.

It is easy to tell if you're using a secure site, just look for an "s" on the end of the "http" in the site's Web address ("https"). The "https" will appear when you are on a screen that asks for your account information.

A recent development is secure HTTP (SHTTP) a secure method for transmitting individual messages, such as email, over the Web. This differs from SSL and SET, which are primarily used for doing business at Web sites.