It's a trite sight gag used in Bugs Bunny cartoons,usually when a mad scientist or other villain points a telescope at the fluffy bunny.

But there's nothing funny about being watched in reality. And every time you use the World Wide Web, you're leaving yourself wide open to surveillance by people who want to collect all kinds of information about you and fellow Internet users.

Every time you visit a site on the Internet, any home page, gopher site, FTP archive, you unwittingly leave a little calling card that tells the site's administrator where you are, what kind of computer you're using, and what web browser program you're using, even the name of your server.

Find that hard to believe? Take a look at the privacy demonstration page. The site is maintained by the Center for Democracy and Technology, and it offers some enlightening information on what you may have thought was an anonymous activity -- surfing the Net.

The CDT page correctly identified by Service provider, the city I live in, the fact that at home I use a Macintosh that belongs in an antique shop. It also noted I use Netscape Navigator, named the server I was jacked in to, and listed a few pages I had visited beforehand.

According to CDT, anyone with slightly more sophisticated equipment could easily obtain my personal e-mail address and a list of every text and image file I see at their site, as well as what I ignore, and how much time I spend looking at the page.

Once they correlate that data with other information available from other sources, like voter registration lists, phone books (there are many CD-ROMs which contain every published phone number in the country) and marketing databases.

Someone using this information can then target your e-mail in box, your snail mail box, or your personal telephone for junk mail, telephone solicitation, or other methods to try and get you to spend money. You might also be put on a list of people likely to support a certain political candidate or be sympathetic to a certain cause. Who needs it?

There's way to fight back. Surf anonymously. The CDT page contains a link to a very interesting site called The Anonymizer.

Anonymizer acts as a middle-man between you and the sites you want to see. What you do is point your browser to the Anonymizer URL page, and enter the address of the page you want. It will then go out and find it for you -- without leaving that annoying little calling card of yours.

My first test of the Anonymizer was simple. I called up the same CDT privacy page mentioned earlier, just to see what my new calling card would look like. Instead of being from Idaho, I was listed as being from California, where the Anonymizer server is located. The make and model of my computer were absent, as was the name of my service provider and any recently visited pages. In fact the only thing the CDT page could still register was the fact I was using Netscape. Who isn't?

If you're interested in using the Anonymizer page, make sure you read the FAQ file first. There are some detailed instructions, but once you get started, it's easy to use.

The reason why corporations and others try to gather this information about us is simple. If your primary hobby is doing crafts and needlework, there's little value in sending you an offer to subscribe to a history magazine about battles of the Roman Empire.

Like it or not, if you spend money, some marketing firm somewhere has probably gathered some kind of demographic information about you, and this process of information gathering happens whether you own a computer or not. The Internet just makes it easier to gather more specialized information about your likes and dislikes.

I for one, don't plan to make it any easier for them.

On Monday night I saw the first intelligent TV coverage of the Internet ever. If you haven't yet seen MSNBC, the new all-news network, which in Pocatello is on Channel 50, check it out. The network is the product of an unusual partnership between Microsoft and NBC. And though the network is only a week old, it's showing considerable promise.

Two very bright spots are the shows "The Site" and "Internight."

The Site is a show devoted entirely to the Internet and computer technology in general. Basically, the show does what I do here each week, but on a daily basis. Check your TV schedule, or check out it's Web site.

Internight's inaugural broadcast on Sunday night was an 45-minute appearance by President Clinton, moderated by Tom Brokaw, which included questions from viewers by phone and via the Internet. I can only hope that it's an indicator of things to come from television, which is too often a useless wasteland.

Arik Hesseldahl covers business and technology for The Idaho State Journal.