Notes from the Electronic Cottage 04/27/06

In this edition of the Electronic Cottage, we continue our series on privacy in the digital age. Tdoay, we look at the collusion between government agencies, which must operate under legal guidelines when they collect information on citizens, and private data aggregators, which operate under no such controls. The result? Government agencies such as Homeland Security spent about $30 million taxpayer dollars last year to buy data about U.S. citizens that the agencies would otherwise not have been able to collect. If you care about your personal privacy, you may want to begin leaving as thin a trail behind you as possible in physical space as well as cyberspace.