Exposing the Truth About Learning Secrets Via Web.

YOU'VE probably read that you can be tracked like an animal through the Internet. Wherever you go, you leave a trail that clever cybersleuths can follow.

But it isn't as easy as you think to uncover your secrets. I know, because I've tried.

Any Web suffer has seen ads for cheap spy or detective software. They claim, in capital letters, "NOTHING IS SECRET ANY MORE." They say, "You'll be SHOCKED at the kind of information you can find!!!!!"

And indeed, they list many shocking, possibilities. Personal hospital records, mental-health records, bank accounts, secret offshore assets, criminal records, dossiers on people who have held government jobs, credit-card records and speeding tickets, as well as more mundane items like past employment -- all supposedly yours for the asking.

Spy software tickles the worst in the people who buy it. "Discover dirty secrets your in-laws don't want you to know," crows one ad. "Find out how much alimony your neighbor is paying."

The ads also promise to lead you to taboo military sites, illegal drug archives or software piracy places.

The programs I found cost from $5 to $30, with extra fees for regular updates, special investigative tools, etc., etc.

I love all my neighbors and in-laws, and wouldn't dream of snooping on them. Still, I wanted to see exactly what spy software might be capable of uncovering. So I called my friend Aaron, a recent college grad and crack Web operator, and asked him to root through one of the programs.

His mission: find, out what he could about me and a few public figures I named.

I won't tell you which program he used, because I don't want to give it any inadvertent publicity. But here's Aaron's bottom line: "It turned up nothing, and does not actually offer much, if anything, of what it initially claimed to provide. In short, it gives off the appearance of a scam."

What did he find out about the public figures? Nothing.

What did he find out about me? A phone number and incomplete address. That's all.

He could have gotten my phone number from a Web white-pages service, free. And in fact, this spy program used one of those free services, while trying to make users think that the software itself was retrieving the information.

Aaron looked for me under various categories of information, such as real-estate ownership. In some cases, he got the names of services that search public-records for a fee (with no guarantee that much would turn up).

In other cases, he got the phone numbers and mailing addresses of government offices and agencies (which might or might not have told him anything).

He read through lots of dreary prose, little of it useful, some of it disturbing. Here's one example of how this program suggested you find people or get their records: Dream up the name of a company that might have a plausible reason for needing the information, and pretend to be employed there. It even suggested fake business cards.

Naturally, Aaron went hunting for the promised taboo sites. But hard as he tried, he couldn't find them.

Much of the personal information these services claim to have isn't available anyway, unless you lie to get it and aren't found out. Credit histories, for example, can't be accessed by the general public. You have to be an authorized user of the data, and be able to prove it.

Several years ago, a business reporter misrepresented himself to get the credit histories of several public figures. After he wrote about what he found, the credit bureau sued him.

Nor is there any general access to hospital and mental-health records. Your employer can potentially learn what's going on if the company's health insurance pays. But this stuff isn't on the public Web.

Certain types of data can be checked by attorneys, landlords, employers, banks, merchants, police departments and others. Savvy and determined seekers might find public postings you've made on Net message boards.

But your neighbors can't buy your "dirty secrets" for $30. Nor can you buy theirs.

Your life isn't the open book that these spy programs pretend. If you buy software to snoop into someone's privacy, you deserve to lose the money a useless program costs.

Full Disclosure Often Requires You to Ask

In Moneyland, companies find a million ways of nipping a little extra cash out of your pocket. Toddy's example: a telephone company, selling an extended-payment plan. The company's sales reps have made the plan sound cheaper than it really is.

My story involves Bridgett Baron, an accountant, who wanted a second phone line in her home. She called a phone company and learned that the total cost would come to more than $150.

The phone rep offered to let her stretch her payments over two to 12 months, at sounded cheap, so she agreed.

But then Baron started to rethink. A 1.5 percent charge came to around $1.23. How come the company was offering financing at so low a rate?

So she called back and asked for clarification. Says Bridgett: "Is that 1.5 percent for the whole year, or 1.5 percent per month? Says the rep: "Yes, for the whole year, per month."

Luckily, Baron isn't someone who just fell off a turnip truck. She asked point-blank: "Does that mean 18 percent per year?" Well, yes, the rep finally conceded -- the cost of extending payments comes to an annualized 18 percent.

Well, gosh. I thought that, by law, creditors had to disclose the true, annual interest rate when customers paid in installments. How can the phone company get away with claiming that its financing costs just 1.5 percent?

Finding the answer led me deep into the Big Muddy. After a long slog, I learned something that may surprise you: Utilities can disclose whatever they want.

Under the federal Truth in Lending Act, lenders have to tell you the annual percentage rate (APR) on any load. But public utilities, such as phone companies, are generally exempt from Truth in Lending, says attorney Kyung Cho-Miller of the Federal Reserve, which administers the law.

So that's what passes for "disclosure." The full truth is reserved for those who know enough to ask.

Jane Bryant Quinn