Privacy: do we have it online?

Once I had a really big fight with my boyfriend when he logged in on my Facebook page and read three really big paragraphs I had written to a friend of mine about him. I can't remember properly but in that time I was really mad at him, and I yelled that he had not shown respect to my privacy and space. I got to think much later that, although he was, indeed, disrespectful and shouldn't have intruded on my personal life, I can't claim for privacy on a Facebook page. It simply has no sense at all.

Everything we type, everything we talk to each other on any social network is being stored somewhere. Of course, much of it is not being used, is virtual waste. Gigas and gigas of texts, images and files we trade with our friends everyday through these social networks. The major companies haven't found yet a use for it. They are just storing it, and as the new technologies just advance - in a way that virtual space doesn't seem to become a problem in the future - they just don't care. But the fact is that there is a LOT of data being stored, and the big companies have easy access to it.

So isn't it kinda worrying, that every little thing we type to each other is somewhere, in some hard disk, stored, just waiting to become useful? Yes it is. Imagine how misread can be all this data if, somehow, you become a suspect of a crime you haven't actually committed. Imagine if you said things to your doctor or your lawyer - things that should have the privilege to be maintained secret - and they hack and manage to get them? I know this scenery might sound a little too fantastic and unreal, but these are only to illustrate, in a overwhelming way, what could happen with all the things we store online and we call "private".

For now, they haven't yet found a way to use all this data. Most of it is being stored and it is slowly starting to worry main TI companies, not because of the virtual space, for I just said, there is enough of it, but because it might reach an amount that it becomes impossible to process it. They are, at this very moment, trying to find a way to process this data and to make it useful. Yes, all your texts and all your stuff you put online and you don't want all of the people to find out or see - all this stuff is actually being processed. They are trying to find patterns, to use it somehow, trying to turn it into marketable information. But they haven't yet. Although you may think that sites as Amazon.com and others are really intelligent cause they seem to know what products would you want to buy, they are not using "private" information to run this algorithms. They are using information based on what you searched online, what, I must warn you if you don't know already, is not private. Not a single word you search online is private.

But concerning the data and texts that all social networks assure you that it belongs to you and to you only, you should know that it is being processed. They are trying to find a way to use it, but they haven't yet. What will become of us when they do? That said, here's my advice: do not put your whole life on the internet. Whether you like it or not, it'll go global.