Don't blame DB. Maybe it was a site you visited after seeing it mentioned here. I don't think DB uses any kind of spyware. Alexa is built in to Internet Exploder so blame M$FT for that one. There are some easy ways around Alexa. Do a Google and learn how to control the related.htm file that Alexa uses. I don't mind Google offering me their "Suggested Links" when i do a search but i don't trust M$FT ... but that's just me. Sometimes the Suggested Links box has interesting sites. If you use the internet from home, you probably don't have much privacy no matter how many doodads you have running unless you get into encryption and chained proxy servers. Your best bet is to use a hardened install of unix and just forget about using Windoze for the internet.

The simplest way to have privacy on web browsing is to use public computers and use a different username and password for every single account you have ... and change them regularly. Many people use the same username and password for many different accounts. Well, if you sign up on a message board and use the same login to check your e-mail and also at your bank or credit card, well, you can imagine the possible damage.

Zonealarm has a spyware tool they try to sell me but i gave it their free trial and it gave me false alarms telling me i had spyware running that just wasn't there. Their free firewall works fine but i don't trust them for their paid software. Most people would be fooled into believing it. It's bordering on fraud to falsely tell people that they have spyware just to sell them their anti-spyware software.