Spyware. It sounds nasty... and it is. Spyware grabs your information and at its best, creates a marketing profile that is then sold to advertisers. At its worst, it can capture login and password information from your online accounts and this information is sold. See a pattern developing? It's all about the money. Spybot Search and Destroy helps to keep your computer free of this online threat. Fair to say, no computer should be without it.

Just in case you don't want to get bombarded with calls or messages, Skype gives you the option to

change your privacy settings

. These allow you to toggle whether people need to be contacts in order to call you or to send messages or video. We'll show you how to do all that and more in this tutorial!

As you travel the Internet you hear talk about "

cookies

." Some sources imply that cookies are bad. That they're

software that spies on you

. Here we're going to tell you what a "cookie" really is and what it does!

Internet cookies

: Are they safe? For the most part, yes. Can they be deleted? Sure, but your favorite sites will no longer "remember" you and some services out and out won't work. Are they dangerous? Some are. Are they yummy? Not so much.

What is spyware? It's software that's installed on your computer without your knowledge or consent. It can steal your personal information. It may gather information on you, your computer, your browsing habits and more. It can lead to identity theft and make your computer run slowly. If you're going to have a computer on the Internet, you need to understand what spyware is and protect yourself against it.

There may be times when you'd like to surf the Web and not have "tracks" left behind. Say you're shopping for a special present for a loved one. You may not want them seeing that you were on certain Web pages. For times like these Internet Explorer 8 offers InPrivate Browsing. In this mode IE8 doesn't save cookies, history, temporary Internet files, and other such online tracks.

Google Chrome's "Incognito" mode allows you to visit sites but without others knowing. Say you were looking for that perfect Christmas gift and didn't want your wife to find the traces, Google Chrome's "Incognito" mode can help you out. It doesn't keep cookies, search or browsing history. It will, however, keep any bookmarks or files you download.

Google Chrome gives you some options you can configure so it behaves just the way you want. Configure home page, cookies, passwords and lots more.

While surfing around the Internet you pick up a lot of useless files. They go into a cache and are supposed to make your Web pages load faster. Whether you use Internet Explorer or Firefox you pick up these files every time you surf. Here's how to get rid of them.

On the Internet today spyware has become even more of a threat than viruses. For this reason it's important to make sure you're always running Anti-spyware software on your computer. You can run a combination package that contains both anti-virus and Anti-spyware or you can run a separate program for each.