Connection: Is it possible to have our privacy back?

At the dawn of the public internet in the 1990s, it was fun and the popular thing to do to maintain your anonymity.

Hide the real you and be whomever you wanted to be, browse anywhere and talk with everybody out there. All of this without leaving a trace of who you really are. That was then.

Now, with the dominance of social network sites, the rules have changed. If you want to be part of it, your life will be exposed and definitely 2010 was the year of full exposure. Or should that be "full disclosure"?

It has been brought on by the preponderance of Wiki-Leaks, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Multiply, Orkut, etc. All will know where you had dinner last night, the name of your spouse, your hobbies, and more.

Commercially, it is more interesting for an online business to have a model with a real, well-designed consumer profile than base the same on assumptions, as was the case earlier. More so, as the latter were mostly based on anonymous web users leaving behind fake profiles.

Digital entrepreneurs realise the importance of real information and have invested in getting it. Today, the profitable online companies are those which can deliver the most reliable user profiles for advertisers. Also, your real information will facilitate the processing of your credit card at the other end.

The technology also helps to expose our privacy to a global audience. Camera and voice records from a mobile can just as easily capture unexpected moments in your life without you noticing.

More than ever before, the responsibility of our actions will be measured and registered as indelible images. There is no way to return to the past to fix what we did wrong or not.

Graham found other Graham in Facebook

Can you imagine finding someone with exactly the same name and a life very similar to yours? It happened with Graham Comrie of Aberdeen, Scotland.

He discovered through Facebook that there was another Graham Comrie, born in Ellon, who has a startling physical resemblance to him, and a life that's almost parallel.

Both are professional photographers, have redheads as wives, two daughters each and Lhasa Apso as puppies. Scary, yes. But it seems the two have had fun with the series of coincidences.

HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!

Yes, you can check on Google Maps. There is a city called Saint-Louis-du-Ha!-Ha! and it is located in Quebec, Canada.

Numbers

Eighteen per cent of US internet users have paid access to digital newspapers, magazines or articles, a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has revealed. The study conducted on 755 people between October and November 2010 was aimed at knowing what kind of "material intangible" users buy.

This is opposed to tangible products like books, computers, and the like, purchased on the web. In total, 65 per cent already paid for some kind of online content.

The user who buys content over the internet spends about $10 (Dh36.78) a month. Of the total surveyed, 46 per cent bought only one or two types of content covered by the survey, and 16 per cent bought six or more types of content.