hi Rick,

when you log-in at http://brainmeta.com/forum/index.php?act=Login&CODE=00 , you have the option to select the following: "Privacy, do you want to appear on the active users list? Don't add me to the active users list", which means you'll be invisible to everyone except the admin, which is effectively everyone since I rarely use the 'last click' feature, and when I do, it's to see what pages are being viewed and not who is viewing them.

About privacy, your ISP can always see where you go online, unless you encrypt the contents of the web pages you're viewing and the requests that you make. Going through a proxy, which masks your IP address, means that people running the proxy can see what pages you're viewing online. However, there is so much traffic online that it makes it almost impossible to monitor every single webpage that people view, and this fact almost guarantees your privacy. As an ISP, yes, I guess you could monitor webpages that your customers are viewing and invade their privacy, but when you consider how many webpages people view, and how much of it is essentially "junk" or otherwise meaningless, it makes the incentive for engaging in this sort of questionable behavior very low or nil. I'd figure that an ISPs time would be better spent trying to improve their service than spending it on trying to monitor their customers detailed web usage.