Re: If you want your private life to remain private
Companies start sharing data with each other. Eg perhaps a supermarket end up doing a deal with facebook, so that Facebook has access to loyalty card data, ie all your shopping purchases going back years. The supermarket likewise has access to your profile info, who your friends are, etc. Or perhaps it's car insurance companies sharing data with facebook, or credit agencies. Your employer, the government (tax man). All of them sharing data with each other for supposed efficiency and benefit. The more data they have, the more other things they can deduce about you, things you haven't even said.
Yes data protection laws are meant to prevent data sharing, but wait for companies to start pushing governments into watering down such laws. Or really they don't have to, they just need to supercede them, reword them, remeaning them. "Join together". They'll add stuff into small print, even big print, and it'll become acceptable. If you really want that broadband subscription you'll need to agree to sharing your data with a Consortium of companies.
The Consortium, a group of 612 wide ranging international corporations who have built a shared database of customer/user data which benefits them all. Becoming a customer of one company and the data can be seen by all of them.
It's already beginning. Look at how in recent years online accounts are starting to be "linked" together. An account on youtube? That'll need to be linked to your gmail account. Maybe link in your yahoo account too. Want to sign up to post comments on a news site? You will need to register with your Facebook account. Cookies and ubiquitous "like button" style icons track every website users visit.
Vast machines crawling over all this human data trying to infer facts about customers. Playing off one customers data against another. Things you never put online are figured out by these machines instantly. Eg perhaps they deduce that every year in July you go on holiday to Spain, they can even guess where and when you will go next year and likely who you will meet there. They figure out you aren't that interested in sport (from purchases and lack of sport related comments on twitter/facebook). They even classify your psychology from your purchases and friends - and videos you've watched online and search engine searches you've made. You are a type N7 male, you are most exploitable by method 7, you are attracted to type B females. There is a 90% chance that you will favor product N. If Company N does X, you will have a 77% likelyhood of doing Y. Your profit retrieval potential warrants a joint action by companies B and C. If you won't supply more data, they'll ask your friends for it, subtly of course, so they don't know they are doing it.