I remember reading “1984” for the first time in 2001 and fearing the watchful eyes of Big Brother. It made me become politically active because I assumed that Big Brother would grow in the form of government. I believed the threat would come in the form of federal agencies taping our phones, putting video cameras on every street block and monitoring us through every available channel. It seemed the concept of privacy would be lost to our people for good. I remember waiting impatiently while America Online took forever to “dial up” just so I could access my email and read a few news clips. The sound of my sister’s voice, begging me to sign off so she could use the phone to gossip with her friends, still rings in my ears. I never imagined that this rather simplistic and unimpressive networking device would be the instrument through which privacy would be completely eradicated for the American people.                                                                                                                                                                                                     Today, the Internet operates through broadband at lightning speed. Our favorite TV shows are streamed to us instantaneously, anyone can become an investigative news team by starting a blog, we sell our cars directly to each other on Craigslist, we purchase everything from furniture to plane tickets within seconds on various websites and, best of all, we connect with all of our friends and acquaintances, living half our lives on social networking sites. The Internet has given us so much and completely revolutionized our way of life. But it has also provided a window for anyone or anything to peer into our lives, learning our most intimate secrets and confidential information.  Facebook is one of the main venues through which this has occurred.                                                                                                                                               Valued at over $75 billion dollars, Facebook is one of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world. But it isn’t the service Facebook provides its users that fills up most of the digits on their balance sheet, it is the users themselves. Our personal data is collected, categorized and filtered by Facebook’s interface and sold off to advertisers. Every message we send to one another is read and filed, every website we visit is recorded and every photo we post is scanned. It isn’t just Facebook at the helm of information gathering; Google also tracks every word written on a Gmail account and records everything that is searched for on its site. Other companies have installed cookies and tracking software on our computers without most of us noticing or having the technical knowledge to do anything about it. The amount of information these companies have on each of us is astounding. The worst part is that we have no legal right in the United States to know what data mining companies know about us. In Europe, there are laws that protect citizens against this.                                                                                         It isn’t just advertisers that this information is sold to. Employers access these information pools for hiring purposes: creditors use it to evaluate you and insurance companies set your premium by it. You may never even know why you weren’t hired, why you were denied a loan or rated at an undesirable level by an insurance company. Many individuals have had their mortgage applications rejected or had their credit limits changed solely based on a cluster of data, which simply shows what other people who have similar likes and dislikes to you have done. If a study shows that fans of Dave Matthews Band are more likely to not pay their credit card bill and you tend to visit their website often, then you may very well be told that you have to pay a higher interest rate …and they are never going to tell the reason why.