2009 - The year our privacy was lost?

As the year draws to a close we start to reflect on what that year has brought; and one can't reflect on such things without realising a considerable amount of the individuals privacy has been lost. So the question draws, will history hold 2009 as the year privacy was lost?

Facebook and Twitter and of course the Google machine have been the big violators of our privacy in 2009, gathering wads of data on us. This year Facebook made no less than 4 changes to their privacy policy, each one inching just that much more of your privacy away. As a result not only is everything you place on facebook up for documentation and collation with them, but so their privacy policy states, so is every other website you visit including how you interact with every site you visit.

Facebook also teamed up with Microsoft to place facebook on the Xbox 360, automatically updating your facebook status with what games, movies and music your using, as well as various other detailed information about them. Of course once the data is on facebook they file it away to make just that much more of an accurate picture of you. The world went twitter mad in 2009 as well, updating each other with their smallest, most tedious of actions. twitter itself; with a very facebook like privacy policy violated our privacy collating all the data we unwittingly delivered to them.

But it doesn't stop there, facebook took our twitter content and got us to stream it directly from twitter to them where the data could become facebooks to gather as well. And all the while the google machine gobbled up data from facebook, twitter and every other corner of the internet. Google's privacy policy shifted this year to allow for the collection of even more data. Your name, age, date of birth, the school you went to, your medical records, your likes and dislikes, your ex's, school grades, the games, movies and music you involve yourself with, your marital status, your credit rating, how much money you make, how much you paid for your house and how you paid for it...it's all their, publically viewable through google if you only know what to search for.

But where facebook collate each piece of our data as their policy allows for more collection, google play a more shifty game. For google the game plan is to creep through gathering more and more data, but to wait until the time is write to change the policy on collating the data.

But make no mistake, the time WILL come, after all Google are a targeted ads company, gathering data about you and collating it is what their business model is made up of. And with new services like Google's Public DNS and comments from Googles CEO Eric Schmidt on CNBC like

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."

the stage is certainly set for a future where google know and collate EVERYTHING you do online. And what's more, knowing google; it will all most likely become publically available as well. The thought becomes even scarier when you consider that more and more devices are moving online.

The future see's devices like the Television and Radio, the telephone, the washer/drier and even the fridge all moving online. Even the video game console seems set to be replaced by a Set Top Box to link into a virtual unit. In this future one can expect your weekly shopping list, your phone calls and even how often you wash your clothes and how much water you use to added to the list of google indexed and publically available content. A wise man once said, "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The big question now becomes, where do we go from here? Knowing what has happened to privacy through 2009 do we allow our privacy to further unravel or do we steal it back from the fingers of sleazy two faced advertising corps, back into our own control?