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In April of this year, Visa, JP Morgan, and other top financial firms met with major information brokers and tech companies to discuss a bold new proposal: using consumer databases to identify national security risks. If the idea becomes a reality, background checkers could scrutinize a huge mass of your personal info--your buying patterns, your religious affiliation, your medical history, even your magazine subscriptions--every time you board a plane.

Collecting consumer data for one purpose and then using that information for another is "a fundamental privacy violation," says Chris Hoofnagle, legislative counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Unfortunately, the trend toward sharing collected data appears to be accelerating. And increasingly, what you do online can affect you offline, and vice versa.

What can you do? We polled privacy experts and came up with 34 steps you can take to lower your public profile and reclaim some, if not all, of your privacy.

We've divided the steps into three parts based on the level of security they provide.

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