I appologize if this is the wrong area to post this in. But I wanted to get a feel for what all of you do (or try to do) to minimize your "footprint" on the web. Do you care if your ISP monitors you? Are you worried that excessive dl from sources such as limewire and BT will eventually get you in trouble? What do you do to eliminate that risk?

I was using a service called iPhantom that supposedly annonimizes your presence on the web. I am thinking of eliminating it as it costs $120/yr and it seems to significantly slow down my transfer speeds (all my traffic is routed and filtered through its servers).

Please respond with your feelings on this subject and what you try to do to eliminate the risk? Thanks!

your best bet for Limewire and BT is to download but not share... And coming from someone who used to work for an ISP, they do minimal watching they primarily monitor those residential users with very high bandwidth usage (upload & download) for legal reasons.

~Cheers

If you don't do any thing illegal you have nothing to worry about.

Your ISP will always know yours. The other end may not know where the other end originated, but still may be able to track it down with a lot of work.

If there was something that you were doing that required law enforcement, lawsuits, etc to be going after you, they will find you.

It's a simple WHOIS command, either through a website like network solutions, or through a command on your computer to find out which ISP your IP address is coming from.

It takes a simple call from a government official to track the IP address back to who was using it at the time that an event occurred, even if you're on DHCP from your ISP.

I don't know how much a proxy service can protect you from that, I don't know enough about it. If you need to be worried about your IP in the 1st place, you may want to change your online behavior.