As electronic devices, especially those with Internet connectivity, become ever more ubiquitous there several issues that become ever more important to address. On the user end, privacy is becoming a mayor contention point.
User's data private data belongs to him, yet many companies and governments have their eyes on acquiring it for their own purposes. For companies, and some private individuals, user's data is valuable in order to make a profit. They use it to target ads tailored made for particular users using their own data, or they can sell that data to third parties for their use.
On the government front, they can use the data to monitor people behavior in order to suppress our freedoms, by cutting communications or entry to particular forums. In some cases, they can use our data to target particular individuals in order hinder their ability to communicate ideas that the government doesn't want shared.
That's why we need to be mindful of what information are we giving, and to who are we are giving it to. It's easy to think that all sites have the same levels of privacy, or that the wont share our data with third parties. That's not true, privacy levels vary from site to site widely. Because of this we need to be aware of what's the privacy policy for each of the sites we interact with, and only give them the information as needed.
Above that, we need to make certain that us are the ones controlling the Internet. If one entity comes to govern the Internet, us as users have the most to lose from it because we would have to play by their rules. The Internet is the collective property of the people, with only sites being owned by an individual or company. It should remain like this, so that truly free and unrestricted flow of communication among people remains open, and so that the people decides what they share and with who.
At the end, by keeping the Internet free we can ensure our privacy.
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