The digital world is eroding our privacy. Every week, users post 3.5 billion pieces of information on Facebook. Twitter has over 100 million users. Google has over 900,000 servers. The content on social media sites reaches 80% of all internet users.

The data trail we leave behind on the internet is enormous.

“There has never been another time in history where privacy was under the kind of assault it is today,” said Rainey Reitman, activism director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Consumers have increasingly digital lives and they are developing an unfathomably large data trail every day.”

There is a perfect storm, Reitman says, involving digital lives, low-cost storage that allows companies to save everything, and the revenues that incent those companies to collect as much data as possible.

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