It's pretty much common knowledge now that privacy invasion and illegal data collection is big business.  Google is collecting data & profiling IPs... that's fact.  They are seeking to make all information, even that on your hard drive (if you "volunteer"... remember "Google Desktops", etc etc), effectively available to anyone.  "Freely available" and "open-source" is the guise, privacy invasion and profiling is probably closer to the actual objective.

http://tor.eff.org/
Tor is a proxy app for anonymity online, a friend pointed this tool out to me.  It chooses a random IP by which you're "not" identified when you surf or whatever.  It works with Firefox, a lot of chat clients, bittorrent clients (I think), not sure about Internet Explorer.  After install, you can set it up with your applications which is pretty easy, see http://tor.eff.org/documentation.html.en.  One caveat is that it slows down throughput; I'm not sure of a way to improve this yet.  If anyone has knowlege of this please let us know.

http://www.scroogle.org/scraper.html
Searching Google from this site (instead of google.com or whatever) will not allow Google to profile your IP on what searches you conduct, amongst other things.  It's called "scraper" b/c it scrapes off your IP and Scroogle's IP is attached to any searches, instead of yours.

Hope this helps.  I'm feeling at this time that proactively maintaining, or re-establishing, our privacy is important.  If any other NR'ers have any other tips, please post.  Let's keep this going!

cheers