More and more information is being put online every single day. This includes more and more private information about people, including you. There are now directories full of personal information about you and most of the people you know, sort of like an Internet phonebook, but with even more information involved. Quora, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook–using social networks like these has become the norm, rather than the exception. But the information you publish there is not within a contained system, other organizations and websites can either gather or purchase information about your profiles on those social networking sites.

Paul Jozefak, in this article, does a good job of breaking down why this is important and why so many people, who have nothing to hide, care so much about this issue. It is good to see that some people, Jozefak amongst them, understand why this is an issue, even to people who do not have anything whatsoever to hide from the public at large. It is an issue of privacy and not wanting to be unfairly defamed in an atmosphere, the Internet, that offers no legal protections.