SciAm, March, 1996 "Privacy and Data Collection on the Net." There are still a few eccentric souls who gamely try to hold on to what lingering shreds of anonymity they possess. They never fill out questionnaires; they give their Social Security numbers only to their bank and to their broker. They encrypt their e-mail; they bypass the supermarket discount card that links identity to purchases; they pay cash for medical procedures they do not want known; and they wait patiently for e-cash to become a reality. Joining these hardy individualists are privacy advocates such as EPIC and Net groups like cypherpunks which believe in untraceable communications and in the technology needed to achieve it. CPU_nks