As there may be people who are uncomfortable signing up to a forum that has as much to do with firearms as this one may well turn out to, it's worth considering some 'security' options. Especially if you are based in a country like the United Kingdom where loathing and fearing people interested in guns is very fashionable and the authorities have pretty much been caught red handed snooping on their citizens recently.
General internet security begins by
Ditching Windows! Could be wrong here and freely admit I've next to no experience of Win8 and not that great in Win7 but Vista was a security nightmare and XP took about ten years to fix so on the whole, not much confidence in Microsoft products. So where does that leave you, Linux, I know I know it's going to be a bit of a pain adopting a new OS but it (sort of) works like this.
Windows and MacOS are laid out like a town with the core administration in the centre and places to do things spread around. Their security strategy is like a police force. It might check the IDs of visitors and patrol and watch for suspicious activity with varying degrees of competence.
Linux however, is arranged like a European medieval walled and fortified town. It has concentric rings of security, integrated from the ground up (as opposed to just grafted on). Some Linux systems can be run from a 'live' disk which requires no installation and leaves no traces or history on the machine.
There are hundreds and hundreds of different Linux operating systems that vary from the easy-to-use family setups like
UBUNTU to the rabidly paranoid specialist sets such as
TAILS which was designed for 'foreign correspondents' (nod nod wink wink, say no more) in unfriendly countries....
Distrowatch is the hub for all the different kinds of Linux
But it may not be possible to instal or use another OS on your machine or you may not be 'that' worried and just like a little more security. The
TOR Anonymity Project could be your answer. It can be installed on Windows, MacOS as well as android devices (which must just thrill the folks at Google!) what it does is bounce your traffic around a network before passing it on to it's destination. Kind of like a Find The Lady - Shell Game.
TOR claims a high degree of anonymity BUT it will slow your connection down, discourage a lot of what passes for internet these days like Active-X and Java-script functions and there have also been rumours that it's has been compromised on some levels.
But the simplest form of limited protection can and really should be done by everyone, all of the time.
Clear Out Your Cookies at regular intervals if not at the end of every session.
Change your passwords on a regular basis, and if you use really intrusive sites such as Facebook, download a new browser and use it only for that site. Then that sites trackers and cookies are held separate and can only see themselves.
It may not be possible to defy a high end attempt to compromise your privacy by some organization with enough raw power to throw at it. But there is no reason to hand everything over on a plate. Anyone with anything to add, disagree, etc. feel free.
as opposed to this 
