When you need to know more about the websites someone is visiting (you want to make sure your kids haven’t been straying on the darker side of the web, say) then checking their cookies has always been one option. But the information you’ll get is often very limited, maybe just to a domain name, and so won’t always be particularly useful.

Google Analytics Cookie Cruncher may be able to help, though, by focusing on Google Analytics cookies. These contain much more data, and in a standard format, so with just a little work you may be able to see the sites someone has browsed, the search keywords used to locate them, the date and time of the last two visits, and the number of times a site has been visited in total.

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Create a document in Microsoft Office and you’ll usually find it includes metadata, information you might not realize was there: your name, company name, some computer details, version information, comments and more.

Windows makes it easy enough to remove metadata from individual documents (right-click > Properties > Details > Remove Properties and Personal Information), but you can also use the free Document Metadata Cleaner 3 to check and clean your entire system in a single operation.

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If you wonder why "A Google User" suddenly is the most popular review commenter at Play, he (or she) is not. Today the store started a radical change, requiring Google Profile to place stars and comments for apps and other content. The days of anonymity are over, and good riddance.

Others disagree, and the move definitely isn't popular with some writers in our newsroom. All the typical justifications are back: People need anonymity to protect their jobs. So on and so on. Blah, blah, blah. I've heard these crap excuses before. You got an opinion, stand by it with your identity -- particularly something like an app, movie or music review.

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About a month ago I posted "Whom do you trust with your personal?", containing two polls. The number of respondents is surprisingly low, so I'm back with them, using a slightly different approach. Perhaps the InterWebs will respond more to the negative trust question.

The results so far don't surprise me. Facebook is distrusted by a wide margin -- 57.42 percent of respondents. Microsoft and Google are most trusted (38.6 percent and 34.5 percent, respectively). But Google also is second-most distrusted (27.1 percent). Both polls provide just five major tech companies but opportunity for respondents to give their own answers. Nine percent trust no one.

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This time of the year is a great one to pick up some technology bargains and the Downloadcrew Software Store is no exception. In addition to the regular deals, there are some extra-special Black Friday/Cyber Monday offers that run until the end of November.

We open with some great savings from CyberLink. PowerDirector 11 Ultimate, which bundles PowerDirector 11 with 22 NewBlueFX effects, is yours for only $99.99, a saving of 23 percent from MSRP. Better still, you pick up a free bundle worth $59.90 with every order! PowerDirector 11 Ultra is yours for $79.95, a saving of 20 percent from MSRP, also shipping with the free bundle. Media Suite 10 Ultra, which is CyberLink’s 11-in-1 multimedia suite, is yours for $89,95, or 31 percent off MSRP. PowerDVD 12 Ultra, is yours for $50, or 50-percent off MSRP.

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Users are becoming accustomed to Adobe security flaws these days. After all the company did occupy five of the top-10 spots in the recent Kaspersky report. While the "occasional" Flash bug can be dealt with, having one's user information stolen is a whole different story, but that is exactly what sources are claiming and Adobe is confirming by shutting down the service in question.

"Adobe is currently investigating reports of a compromise of a Connectusers.com forum database. These reports first started circulating late during the day on Tuesday, November 13, 2012. At this point of our investigation, it appears that the Connectusers.com forum site was compromised by an unauthorized third party. It does not appear that any other Adobe services, including the Adobe Connect conferencing service itself, were impacted".

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From full commercial applications to simple freeware tools, it’s surprising just how many setup programs will now try to install unwanted browser addons on your PC. And too many of these can slow your system down, make it less stable, maybe even compromise your privacy.

The deceptive techniques used by some software means these “extras” can be difficult to avoid, too. But fortunately help is at hand in the shape of the free Toolbar Cleaner, which can assist you in reviewing and taking control of your IE, Firefox and Chrome addons.

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You’ve got to hand it to Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. Despite living under house arrest, his assets frozen, and facing the prospect of extradition to the United States and up to 20 years in prison if found guilty of copyright theft, money laundering and racketeering fraud, he’s pressing ahead with plans for a new file-sharing site.

Mega, his Megaupload replacement, was revealed yesterday, and despite just consisting of a holding page at the moment, was quickly overwhelmed. "Millions of users hitting at once. I'm delighted by the interest. But servers can't handle it. The new Mega will. WOW!!!" Dotcom tweeted an hour after the news broke.

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Like Microsoft in the late late 1990s and early 2000s, antitrust scrutiny confronts Google on two continents. Among the core issues emerging from the preliminary investigations: privacy. Your data, who has access to it, how clear are the search giant's privacy policies and how carefully does the company adhere to them. But Google is by no means the only concern. Facebook is renown for making user interface and feature changes that can suddenly and unexpectedly expose personal data, and there are problems past about third-party applications accessing what they shouldn't.

As more established tech companies offer more services in the cloud, increasingly there is lingering question: Whom do you trust with your personal data? Last month, Apple expanded cloud services with iOS 6 and iPad mini and the fourth-generation 9.7-inch model go on sale November 2, supporting them. On Friday, Microsoft launched Windows 8 and Surface and does same with Windows Phone on October 29. To get the most from these products, users must have a Microsoft account, like Apple and Google require for their cloud services. Meanwhile, Office 365 extends online sync, storage and collaboration features.

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Search engine DuckDuckGo released a video a few days ago that shows how Google personalizes results for all signed in and signed out users. It asked 131 people to search for the same Election related topics ("abortion", "gun control", and "Obama") on Google at the same time, and most of them received slightly different results.

That Google personalizes results in this way is hardly new information. The company has been doing it since 2009 and Eli Pariser covered the topic in depth in his 2011 book, The Filter Bubble (a great read). He also gave an enlightening Ted Talk on the subject in which he observes that "the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see."

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Following the introduction of two-step verification, the popular cloud storage service Dropbox has updated Dropbox for Teams to help team admins enable security features.

The service is updated starting today, and will allow admins to verify which team members have turned on two-step verification and to email those that have yet to enable the feature, all through the "Team" tab. The feature is implemented to aid admins instead of offering them the possibility to remotely enable an extra layer of security through two-step verification, and according to the blog post new features will be developed over time.

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"Most Recently Used" lists are generally a good feature in applications, as they allow you to reload recent documents without having to remember exactly where they’re stored.

But, of course, there are also privacy implications with doing this. And so if you don’t want other users of your PC to see exactly which documents you’ve been accessing recently, you may want to use a third-party tool, like MRU-Blaster, to wipe them all away.

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Lavasoft has announced the availability of Ad-Aware 10.3, an incremental update to the classic antivirus tool that delivers small but still worthwhile improvements all across the package.

Installation is now faster and more straightforward, for instance.

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When you have personal documents that you’d like to keep safe from snoopers then your first thought might be to encrypt them. But this isn’t always the best idea. Just seeing a “Mysterious.doc” file that they can’t open will be enough to tell others that you’ve something to hide.

The free DeepSound, though, offers a different approach. In just a few clicks it’ll take your documents and conceal them within WAV or FLAC files. And if anyone checks, now, all they’ll see is regular audio files that play as usual: there’s nothing to be suspicious about.

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If you’d like to find a good proxy server to keep you anonymous online then there are plenty of online sources which claim they can help. These lists aren’t always reliable, though -- some recommended servers may not work any more, others aren’t as anonymous as you might think -- and you can spend quite some time manually checking their various suggestions before you find anything that suits your needs.

If all that sounds too much like hard work, then, you might prefer to use the free A+ Proxy Finder, which automates the process of locating and evaluating HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS proxies.

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