According to an Australian blog, Facebook's $1 billion purchase of Instagram was less for the application itself and more for the data (including personal data) of the 30 million members of the photo sharing service. Of course, this is just a minor addition to the 900 million users active on Facebook, whose data is already within the reach of Mark Zuckerberg. Frightening as this sounds, the Facebook founder is not the only one who can analyze this kind of "Big Data" to know exactly who you are, where you live, what you do, etc. Every time we upload data to the Web - post photos, play games, update our status/location or make blog posts - we open up our lives for potential scrutiny by not just Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft but also many smaller players who may not be as scrupulous about what they do with our personal details. Of course, some loss of privacy is a natural corollary of being active on the Web, which is why some people refuse to get on Facebook, Twitter or other social media websites. But the growing adoption of Web and Cloud services by individuals and businesses, generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day (as per IBM), raises concerns about how all this data is going to be used and by whom. If large corporations or government agencies can keep tabs on everything I do, as long as I remain online, it won't take long for the dystopian vision of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" to come true
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