I am so tired of those little pop up things on web pages that want us to 'Share This' on the social networks like Facebook and Twitter. In some cases, the box obscures text I want to read, and sometimes they pop up and refuse to go away.

I can see where some people who love to add stuff to their Facebook page would appreciate the convenience, but I'm not one of them.

And I can understand that the newspapers I'm reading online are trying to make some money by letting these advertisers use their web pages to sneak cookies and data spies onto my computer. But all this junk is getting in the way of the way I want to use the Internet.

Last night I was playing AARP Spider Solitaire and there was this new little icon for something called adsense right in the middle of the screen, so in the process of clicking on the cards to play the game, I had to be careful not to click on it, thereby triggering a new webpage. Very irritating.

I tried to find a way to turn it off, and ended up with a free downloaded application called Ghostery that prevents those little data stealers that put cookies on my computer in the background and track my web usage.

There was another application called Incognito that blocks Facebook and Google from following my web usage. I decided that sounds like a good idea, too.

A third application is called Click to Plugin, and it prevents plug-ins from loading automatically.

So far today, I haven't missed any of that extra stuff that is now being blocked. Ghostery makes it possible to see what was blocked on each webpage I go to, so I'm getting an idea of how much stuff is going on in the background. Looking at my cookies today, after deleting all of them last night, all those advertising ones didn't get added back. And my internet is running a lot faster.

This is all on a Macintosh computer, by the way, using Safari. Things probably work different in FireFox for the Mac, and browsers running on Windows.