Ultimately there's a dirty secret about the Internet, which is nothing disappears. All these companies have all your information. They have your search history.
The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.
When I know the data that's being shared and I'm asked explicitly for my consent, I want some sites to understand my habits. It helps them suggest books for me to read or movies for my family to watch or friends for us to connect with.
[I am] not even two bites into breakfast, and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me. I have navigated to a total of four.
If I sign up for Facebook and want my account destroyed, it is impossible. They keep tabs on you; there will always be a trace.
If there is a Like button in a page, Facebook knows who visited that page. And it can get IP address of the computer visiting the page even if the person is not a Facebook user.
Even if you don't state your ethnic background anywhere on LinkedIn or whether you are married with children, a scan of your photos and other people's photos featuring you will make it far easier to deduce.
You can get a subjective and highly factual dossier on most anyone in the public realm almost instantly. It's why publishers don't worry about author photos any more; people just Google a person and get on with things.
I am being stalked across the Web. And why is this happening? Pretty simple: It's huge business.
In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.
That's the power behind a tool like Facebook Connect. It is making a Web without walls. Facebook allows you to go to other sites to comment, rate, etc., without having to set up a new profile for that site.
The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we - and the young, particularly - spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.
