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Your individual account is probably worth very little to the service provider, so they'll have no qualms whatsoever with tinkering with the service or even making radical changes in their interests rather than yours. If you don't like it you're welcome to leave. You may well not be able to take your content and data with you, and even if you can, all your URLs will be broken.

if you really care about your site you need to run it on your own domain. You need to own your URLs. You'll have total control and no-one can take it away from you. You don't need anyone else. If you put the effort in up front it'll pay off in the long run.But it's no longer that simple.

Anyone who's ever run a website knows that building the site is one thing, but getting people to use it is quite another. The smaller your real-world presence the harder it is. If you're a national newspaper or a Hollywood star you probably won't have much trouble getting people to visit your website. If you're a self-employed plumber or an unknown blogger writing in your spare time, it's considerably harder.

Social networks have changed all that. Facebook and Twitter now wield enormous power over the web by giving their members ways to find and share information using tools that work in a social context.

Either way, your social network presence is more important than your own website.

But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve.

es, that's nearly 34,000 new Facebook apps created in one day by customers of just one hosting company.

What Facebook is doing is very different. When it records our activity away from the Facebook site it's a third party to the deal. It doesn't need this data to run its own services.

orst o

all, the way Facebook collects and uses our data is both unpredictable and opaque. Its technology and policies move so quickly you'd need to be a technical and legal specialist and spend an inordinate amount of time researching Facebook's activities on an ongoing basis to have any hope of understanding what they're doing with your data.