Or how everyone is forced to give it up.

Although it has been known for a while that all information available on the Internet and at service providers is accessible to several entities, the world just got new evidence that it is done in large. On one hand, all Internet traffic is analyzed, on the other hand secret agencies have gained access to all major service providers. That means all Information available online has to be considered public and is potentially used to create a personal profile. Here, I want to show what possibilities exist to track every single individual and to obtain a precise description of behavior and actions, probably more precise than we would think.

We all use online services for mailing, social interaction and to do research. All of these require every user to give up some data privacy in order to use the service.

Facebook is the most widely used social network website. It has millions of active users that generate content ay actively posting updates and by browsing content generated by others. As the website is intended to be self contained, meaning that it is not required to leave its boundaries, Facebook is able to generate a fairly complete picture of what every user is doing, whom he is interacting with and what his interests are. Valuable private information (telephone number, email address) can be used to match persons even if the specified name is not the true name.

The Like-button on external websites allows Facebook to track users on their path through the Internet. Even signing out of Facebook does not help, as Facebook still stores information uniquely identifying each user in the browser afterwards. (cite)

Google is known to many as a search engine and with Gmail as an email provider. It also offers a social network, has the biggest advertisement network and controls the Android operating system. The company actively combines data from all sources in order to generate a better user experience and to be able to target advertisements better. A lot of very private information is available, either explicitly because the users are required to specify it, or implicitly due to the enormous amounts of data collected for each user.