Agreed with everything except "The consumer's fault." It's the data age now; information about you will make its way into the global repository without any direct action on your part.

- If you're a professional, someone is providing a way for your customers to audit interactions with you

- If you're a driver, someone is tracking your car's movements

- If you buy products, someone is tracking you bought them

- If you ever communicate online, someone has logged that communication

- If you're ever seen in public, someone can tag your face

... and after all this, if you piss an individual off enough, that individual can create a pastebin and drop as much of your personal info on there as they care to.

We're already past the event horizon of private (easily-gleaned) information staying private; it's time to re-organize the solution space around the assumption that the information is public.

buying products means tracking card payments. Maybe that was just the start, then fidelity cards followed, and even Amazon tracks what you search. And Google to sell you ads.

> (the consumer's fault).

I doubt that. No one prevents someone tagging me on Facebook even if I don't have a Facebook account. Now Facebook knows my name and the corresponding face without me ever using Facebook.

Well you can't do that. You can only tag someone with an account.

You can tag anyone on Facebook even if they don't have an account. When you start typing their name a drop-down box of suggestions appears. Hit the escape key and you can continue typing their name and tag them.

Anyone with your photo can associate it with your name on Facebook even if you don't use it.

Ah just check and yes you are right, apologies. Do people actually do this? Pretty ignorant if they do!

I disagree. Then you narrow down Snowden's point in a pedantic way. Snowden is broadly speaking about privacy. The issue about government mass surveillance is of course without anybody having been aware of its extent. Citizens should have been given the chance to weight in on the usage of surveillance.

But this is along much of the same lines, in that it shows how technology enables ways of invading your privacy that you might not have thought of.

Much of the NSA invasion of our privacy is about the capabilities they get through technology. With just a bunch of dead data, it would not nearly be as chilling as when Snowden explains how they can perform sophisticated searches through all data stored about you.