It's that time of year again -- to hit the streets and protest in the name of privacy and Internet neutrality. On February 23, the designated International Day for Privacy (#IDP13), local activists and advocates are planning to rally outside the Massachusetts Statehouse before hosting a CryptoParty at which they'll teach self-defense tactics for protecting one's self from the prying eyes of Big Brother.

This week's Boston Phoenix cover story -- Hunting the Craigslist Killer: An Untold Detective Story from the Digital Frontier -- would not have been possible without access to a huge trove of case files released by the Boston Police Department. Many of those documents have never been made public -- until now.

You may have heard of a company called Google. They say they're not evil. And to prove they're not evil, when Google was caught collecting people's private email and data when Google's Big Brother vans swept through neighborhoods collecting photographs and scanning for unsecured wi-fi networks, they promised that they would safely discard all the very private information as soon as they felt like it.

Here's a newsflash: privacy is kind of under attack. Fine, we all sort of had that one figured out. But this week in the Phoenix we're bringing you three stories that attempt to bring that big idea into tighter focus. In "Google: The Ultimate Cockblocker," Boston-bred Hustler contributor Scott Fayner laments his inability to date nice suburban girls without them quickly finding out that he used to be married to a porn star.