3. Ditch a PI who’s trailing you
HOW CAN THEY SCREW ME? According to Douglas Calderbank, owner and chief private investigator of Calderbank Investigations, Inc., in Portland, PIs do in fact rely on the covert shadowing TV snoops like Columbo used. Calderbank usually shadows people for health insurance companies trying to rout worker’s comp frauds, but he also does do the occasional “domestic,” which means he’s following targets looking for evidence of “excessive flirtation” and cheating.

WHAT CAN I DO? Calderbank says most firms, including his, own a few different cars to make it tough for targets to catch on that they’re being followed. To add to the intrigue, the PI car will never be right behind you — Calderbank stays two or three cars back in urban traffic — often in the other lane. But, wherever the PI is, he will stay close. If you see a suspicious car going where you go, or you’re up to no good with your best-friend’s wife and you just want to play it safe, pull over to the side of the road and look around all pissed off. You could also loop the block. Calderbank says he’ll often ditch a trail for a while if he thinks the target’s on to him.

4. Settle down and live nowhere
HOW CAN THEY SCREW ME? In personal privacy expert JJ Luna’s classic tome of paranoia, How to Be Invisible, Luna devotes a whole chapter to why it’s a serious danger to let anyone know where you live. If your home address is held by your local postal office or any other company, organization, or loose-lipped family member, your sanctuary can be disturbed by random criminals, identity thieves, or sketchy exes.

WHAT CAN I DO? You need to make your home disappear, at least on paper. Set up what Luna calls a “ghost address” — basically, some spot other than your home where you can regularly retrieve your mail. This could be a rented room (rented under the name of a business or a trust), a mailbox you’ve erected on a rural road, or a company which has agreed to accept mail for you. Needless to say, searching for such a ghost can make you seem mighty suspicious, but Luna explains that if you dig around long enough, with enough money to flash, you can eventually have all of your mail delivered to your ghost and make your real address — poof — disappear.

5. Place a worry-free phone call to your dealer
HOW CAN THEY SCREW ME? Well, it’s a little unclear at this point. According to a now-famous May article in USA Today, phone companies like AT&T and the former MCI have given their customers’ call records (but not conversation transcripts) to the government’s National Security Agency. (The paper has since retracted original claims that Verizon and BellSouth helped the NSA.) The NSA began monitoring international phone calls to and from the US in late 2001. But on August 17, a federal district court judge in Detroit ruled that the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping of America’s phone lines is unconstitutional. She ordered it stopped immediately, although the Bush administration has requested the NSA monitoring program continue pending their appeal.

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WHAT CAN I DO? There’s not much you can do, according to Shenna Bellows, director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, which has asked the state to investigate whether Verizon handed Maine phone records to the feds. You could use a payphone to place all of your calls, but then you’d never have a reliable contact number. Since the privacy infraction we’re concerned with here is perpetrated by the federal government, the best course of action is to lobby your US representatives to get the laws changed, although that can be an uphill battle with two Republican senators. “It’s become tiresome to say ‘Contact Washington. Contact senators Snowe and Collins,’” says Bellows. “There’s definitely a sense of helplessness unless they step in.”

6. Block hackers from accessing your computer
HOW CAN THEY SCREW ME? David Jacquet, an “ethical hacker” and director of education services for Sage Data Security in South Portland, specializes in identifying weaknesses in computer systems that hackers can exploit — and there are usually plenty of them. Hackers can pluck personal information from your e-mail, trick you into revealing that information on a fake Web site, or infect your computer with keystroke-monitors, which record and share everything you type.

WHAT CAN I DO? “The first thing that people need to be aware of is that there is a risk to their privacy whenever they are online,” says Jacquet. He recommends you be as suspicious of a stranger online as you would be of one in the real world, never give out your Social Security number through e-mail, never answer an unsolicited e-mail asking for personal information, and always run a firewall program and anti-virus program like Norton Antivirus. Update your virus program and operating systems daily, and check your credit report every four months to make sure no one has frigged with it.