“Internet giants such as Google and Facebook – as well as governments – store more knowledge about you than your parents do. They can, and do, use it to market to you; they might even hand it over to a judge seeking your name in relation to that document you downloaded, for research.”

Your movements online are of great value and interest to many people – you just don’t know what they plan to do with it. Norma Desmond

“Your friend Kate answers the phone. You remind her you’re meeting at 10am tomorrow for breakfast. You tell her your fractured wrist is healing but the doctor said there’s still some way to go. Your mum’s illness … well, that’s a different matter.

“Your hang-gliding, of course, is on hold, but you want to get back to it soon. And, sure, politics, and, sure, dating …

“The information you’ve conveyed to Kate ranges from the medically-sensitive to the simply private, the important to the trivial – which is fine, because you’re friends.

“Unfortunately, an unknown third party has recorded and documented everything you said, and will use it to continue building an in-depth personality profile of you.

“None of this seems like reality but, in the least dramatic way possible, it is. Whenever you use the internet, you are volunteering to an anonymous third party, be it government or corporations, the sorts of information above, and more.

“For some reason, we’re willing to sacrifice the confidentiality we’ve come to expect in the real world for an open-door policy online.

“Internet giants such as Google and Facebook – as well as governments – store more knowledge about you than your parents do. They can, and do, use it to market to you; they might even hand it over to a judge seeking your name in relation to that document you downloaded, for research.

“We need to expand our expectation of privacy into the digital world. We need to understand this as being fundamental to liberty – not the sign of a paranoid criminal. We live in a democracy and shouldn’t need to justify our desire for privacy. Our citizenship reasonably entitles it to us.

“Above all, it’s critical we break free from the ‘common-sense’ notion that ‘we’re nobody special,’ that the threat of digital theft and espionage somehow doesn’t apply to us. To continue reading this article from The Conversation, click here.