• Privacy is a Fundamental Right in the European Union, so protecting your data should be one of the priorities of EU institutions.

• Very few things in life are free (I am sure you knew this already) and online services are not an exception. You don´t need money for using Google (as well as Gmail, Google Drive, etc), Facebook, Hotmail, Twitter and many other services because you pay with allowing these companies to have access to your data and make money out of it.

• Many smart-phone applications, like Angry Birds and many other, collect part of your data in your phone and use it for their own interests. Some of them even track contact lists and pictures from your phone!

• Every time you have purchased something on the internet it gets registered and stored. This means that there are databases with all the stuff you have bought and your consumption patterns.

• Facebook tracks you every time you visit a website with its 'Like' button. It doesn't matter whether you are logged out from your account or you are not even a Facebook user.

• Out of the 100 biggest websites in the world, only Wikipedia does not track you. All the rest collect some information from you every time you visit them.

• To be able to read all privacy policies you encounter while surfing on the internet you would need to spend one month every year, according to this study (Say goodbye to your holidays!)

 

If you want to know more about your data, privacy and how to protect it, you can take a look to these websites:

https://dataskydd.net/ (in Swedish)

http://protectiadatelor.noisieu.ro (in Romanian)

The Spanish version is coming soon!