BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING; TODAY'S COMPUTERS MAKE INVADING YOUR PRIVACY MUCH EASIER.

Byline: Ken Layne

YOUR home computer sends an identification number to every Web site you visit. Word-processing programs secretly save your name, private information and even your diary entries on a massive corporate database. Customs officers scan your laptop for incriminating files before letting you cross borders. Tiny text files on your PC alert Web sites to your presence and viewing habits. Employers routinely read your e-mail, looking for reasons to fire you.

Welcome to last week.

If you use a recent version of Windows, most likely you have the current edition of Microsoft Word. And if you registered the software online, it quietly sent your name and address and even details of your private files to Microsoft headquarters. A Massachusetts software programmer discovered the creepy feature, and the story went straight to The New York Times, causing a same-day promise from Microsoft to stop the unseemly practice.

The Windows madness came on the heels of a similar privacy outrage involving the latest Intel Pentium computer chip, which was designed to send a unique identifying number to Web sites requesting it. Major computer makers quickly pledged to disable the gizmo, but not before the Center for Democracy and Technology filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, accusing Intel of consumer fraud and unfair business practices.

Dramatic, these latest computer-privacy scandals, but hardly unique.

Chances are your employer is already scanning your e-mail - either by random monitoring or through one of the popular new corporate e-mail sniffers, which seek out dirty words and whatever else might offend the boss. Meanwhile, both your company and the operators of distant Web sites are likely keeping logs of your favorite online haunts and exactly when you visit and what you see.

And the list of prohibited online behavior on corporate computers is growing at an absolutely insane rate. Not long ago, drooling over Web pornography was about the only forbidden use of the office network. But now you can be fired (or at least shamed) for any number of Internet activities, whether checking out recruitment agencies or passing along one of those idiot-forwarded e-mail jokes, buying plane tickets for a holiday or even sending a suggestive note to your spouse.

And if your company hasn't yet caught on to cyber-snooping, rest assured that every sort of government agency may be watching you online. The FBI and countless local-yokel cops obsessively scour the Internet for any sort of lawbreaker, and while it's tough to complain about the prosecution of pedophiles or insider stock traders, it's another matter when a small-town Ken Starr goes after distant people for violating the puritanical pornography or gambling laws of his county. Or when law-abiding Americans get tracked for friendly communications with Russian or Chinese students.

The threat of intrusion doesn't just exist when you're online.

Last August, the Paris correspondent for Communications Week arrived in London, where customs agents seized his computer and tried to scan the hard drive for evidence of pornography or anything else prohibited in Britain. Stunned, reporter Kenneth Neil Cukier watched as the officers tried to probe his portable computer's files. They failed, because they could only deal with Windows machines and not his Apple PowerBook.

Klutzy cops and clueless bureaucrats provide a certain buffer space between an international data-police state and our current mess of laws, treaties, computer systems and the impossible amount of data generated by even a single hour of worldwide Internet traffic.

But with near monopolies like Intel and Microsoft deciding much of the world's information standards - and the bully of U.S. policy stomping the consumer-privacy efforts of foreign governments such as the European Union - how long will it take before everything you do and say online is cataloged for marketers, spies, human-resources departments and future legal actions?

The authorities and corporate giants always need evidence, and computers are custom-made for providing loads of it. As a reporter who has repeatedly come out on the side of privacy, I learned a strange lesson about Internet evidence last month, when I found myself on the corporate side of the issue.

The Internet newspaper I founded in 1997, Tabloid.net, filed a federal copyright-infringement suit against an advertising agency in Dallas last month. To my surprise, my company's Web servers had evidence of the ad agency's computers repeatedly visiting Tabloid.net - quickly doing away with any claims by the defendants that they had no knowledge of my online newspaper or its intellectual property.

In this instance, these digital fingerprints are my friends. But these ever-growing piles of tracking information have no conscience: They can just as easily be used to make your private life very public (just ask Monica Lewinsky, whose home computer was seized by Starr's investigators).

What's truly curious about the computer-privacy debate is how minor a chord it strikes with most PC users, who increasingly volunteer every kind of personal information. The 1.5 million folks who applied to get a free home computer from Free-PC.com - in exchange for detailed data about their lives and habits - are a disturbing testament to this fact.

And the 45 million people who use Microsoft's Web-based Hotmail may be trading e-mail scrutiny by their employers for something so weird we haven't even considered it.

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DRAWING: (Color) no caption (Computer and Big Brother cartoon)

Jeff Goertzen/Dallas Morning News