One of the worst privacy invaders the world has ever seen is the Internet. When you surf, Web sites can find out where you've been and can gather other information about you. Trojan horses and spyware can snoop on you. Key loggers can capture your keystrokes as you type. Eavesdroppers can steal your passwords.

It doesn't have to be that way. The 15 downloads presented here can protect you. You'll find firewalls, password protectors, rootkit killers, trace cleaners, anonymity securers, and more. So check them out, and help yourself to a safer online experience. (Note that the 15 downloads we look at here don't include any antivirus and antispyware programs. We figured that we've covered those packages well enough elsewhere. So instead, we focus on tools you might not have heard about.)

Firewalls

A firewall is one of the most basic pieces of software you can get for protecting your privacy. Any decent firewall shields you from inbound snoopers, and the better ones also prevent sneaky software from sitting invisibly on your PC and making outbound connections to tell others about your activities.

Comodo Firewall Pro

If you have Windows XP or Windows Vista, you have a firewall on your PC courtesy of Microsoft, so you may figure that you're perfectly safe. Wrong--the firewalls built into both of those operating systems have problems. The Windows XP firewall, for example, lacks outbound protection. And the Windows Vista firewall is exceedingly difficult to customize.

A great bet for a truly flameproof firewall is the free Comodo Firewall. It offers great protection against both inbound and outbound threats, along with some very nice extras. Its Defense+ feature, for example, locks down particularly vulnerable files and folders so that nothing can alter them.

If you use this firewall, you will have to spend a bit of time training it. Whenever an application tries to access the Internet from your PC, you'll get a pop-up that asks you whether you want to allow the application to proceed. If you'd like to cut down on the training time and the number of interruptions, use the program's Clean PC mode. In this mode, Comodo scans your PC for applications and registers them as safe. Afterward, you won't see as many alerts.

Among Comodo's other nice extras is an install mode that shuts off the firewall for 15 minutes, so you can install a new application without getting inundated with alerts.

Vista Firewall Control

Windows Vista's firewall is better than the one built into Windows XP because it includes outbound protection as well as inbound protection. Outbound protection is vital, because Trojan horses and spyware often use silent outbound connections to do their damage. In addition, some surreptitious software uses invisible outbound connection from your PC to send out spam or malware without your knowling it.

The Windows Vista firewall has one big problem, though: The outbound firewall is almost impossible to configure. The free Vista Firewall

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