As you jump from website to website, absorbing content in the safety of your own home, people may still be tracking what you’re up to.

Online advertisers today depend on data to help them identify what stores you shop at, what topics you read, what clothes you wear, all in order to target you with more shopping opportunities. They follow you around the Internet to a much deeper extent than many people realize, however.

For example, if you visit a website that has a Facebook Like button, Facebook then knows what sites you like, regardless of whether you’re signed in or not. You’re also tracked with cookies, which can tell a future website which past websites you’ve visited in order to serve you advertisements about that site.

ZoneAlarm, the antivirus and firewall portion of security company Checkpoint, studied these tactics and found that there are 630 different “tracking technologies” that let a company watch your online activity “including your browsing history, clicks, purchases, and videos watched.”

Think that’s a big problem? So do many who are rallying for a Do Not Track feature that will let you tell websites not to use tracking software. Unfortunately, the Federal Trade Commission, which promised the feature last March, has not come to a decision on how to best implement DNT, so we’ll have to wait a little longer.

Bloodhound image via Flickr

If you want to disrupt someone’s business, make your software free. That’s a mantra these days as more companies leverage Internet business models to gain an advantage over competitors.

Check Point Software Technologies is using that strategy today as it launches ZoneAlarm Free Firewall. The cloud-based software will provide an extra layer of protection on top of the antivirus software that consumers and corporations already have.

The firewall uses ZoneAlarm’s community of millions of users to improve security. Check Point’s DefenseNet service analyzes the malware that is automatically reported by those users. Once the safety or danger of a given program is determined, the information is then shared throughout the cloud. It immediately enables the firewall to block attacks and virtually eliminates the need for program alerts and interruptions.

AV-Comparatives.org, an independent research company, asserts that antivirus software misses nearly one in three new viruses. A strong firewall can stop new viruses and other attacks. ZoneAlarm’s firewall includes an inbound and outbound firewall, preventing hackers from getting into a PC and blocking the transmission of data from a computer that has been attacked.

Rivals include the built-in firewall in Microsoft Windows, but that only provides inbound protection. ZoneAlarm also competes with Symantec and McAfee. ZoneAlarm provides some software for free and charges money for premium services.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Check Point is publicly traded and has been on a steady pace of innovation. Check Point bought ZoneAlarm six years ago and it now has tens of millions of users.