I think its interesting to think about how twenty years ago the idea that one could be save in knowing that to most of the world, you were anonnymous. The life you lived was private and only those you interacted with in person knew personal information about you. With the internet now being ubiquitous in modern society, the privacy of the individual has been greatly eroded.
The internet has helped to foster a global age, it brings people from all across the world together in ways never before thought possible. The many positive benefits that this inter connectivity brings to society are counter balanced by several important drawbacks. The ease at which information is shared online is a double edged sword. What you say and do online has the potential to be seen by millions if not billions of people. This risk is compounded by the fact that to most people, what you do online is anonymous, as you are doing these things usually from the privacy of your home.
This conflict between the expectation that one's actions online are private and the reality that virtually anything one says, does, or visits can be recorded and tracked is one that is still being worked out in the minds of the general public. One of the most intrusive ways privacy is compromised online I feel, is via the targeted ad profiles that are created for individuals based on everything you do. Google's ad-sense is a perfect example of this. We use Google's products online everyday and we seldom think about the fact that they are collecting private information about our habits and interests and transforming this into a profile to target ads to. It is very easy to look at these practices and foresee a future where our online presence is just as public if not more than our real life one.
