Say Goodbye to Privacy

Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
Regina Brett

Danny Dover makes an interesting point on privacy -
The privacy conflicts .. encountered in the offline world are nothing compared to those .. in the online world.

With a story & hard facts he illustrates how our private details are tracked by popular websites -

• Google is storing hundreds of .. metrics about it's users.
• Apple is rumored to be building a $1 billion data center..
• In total, 25 Terabytes of user activity data is stored daily by Facebook.
• AT&T reportedly has 20,268 servers. This is infantile compared to Google's estimated 1,000,000 servers.
• Twitter recently peaked at 5,000 messages a second following Michael Jackson's death. Odds are one of them was yours.
• Digg says that only about half of its server load is from visitors to its website. The other half is a mix of Digg buttons and API calls. This means a non-trivial amount of information that Digg collects is from people who are not even on the Digg domain.
• Youtube serves over 1,000,000,000 (billion) views a day. Odds are you are one of them.
• The major credit card companies (like Visa) are now hiring psychologists and statisticians to mine your buying data and figuring out who is a liability.
• Microsoft is in the process of finishing one of the world's biggest data centers in anticipation of creating the world's first mainstream cloud-based operating system, Microsoft Azure. In Microsoft's eye, the future is in your data.
  
• Amazon has more than 55 million active customer accounts.
• Mint Software was recently bought by Intuit Inc. making its combined collection of personal finance information one of the biggest in the world.
• The United Parcel Service (UPS) can reach more than 4 billion of the earth's 6.3 billion people to which it delivers more than 13.3 million packages each day.
• Each of the 40,000 systems in Domino's Pizza's franchises are connected to their global network. Your pizza order is not alone.
  

And some people actually think nobody is interested in them :-)

Also see:
Internet activist: The dark side of web personalisation