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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.

"Companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft are expanding their data collection techniques and they are not telling consumers and citizens why,"

The issue is about how you pay for online services and whether you are happy to sacrifice privacy for getting a service for free.

Most newspapers in the world are posting every newspaper they have ever printed, so people are finding that things they did in the past are being made public.

e believes it is the Europeans who are driving the policy debate, while the US strategy is to lobby the Europeans to accept the idea that there can be self-regulation, to trust the Googles and Facebooks and let this market grow.

The users themselves are problems as well," he says "Because they post, blog, tweet and do everything else also."

A lot of times most people click 'Yes' without reading what the privacy policies are” End Quote Frank Ahern

Google has changed its rules to allow information to be shared across all its services.

Internet privacy: Genuine concerns or paranoia?

On the web, the rule is: if you're not paying, then you are what's being sold.

Probably the simplest way to reduce personalisation is to use an anonymising service. Instead of accessing the web directly, you access it via a third-party proxy server, so your that requests are mixed in with thousands of others. These services usually allow you to control cookies, turn JavaScript on and off, withhold "referrer details" and so on.

Nonetheless, it's often useful to have access to an anonymous proxy service, and everybody should find one they like. Examples include The Cloak, Megaproxy, Proxify and ID Zap. There are also networked open source privacy systems such as Tor and I2P.

Google also tracks your progress across hundreds of thousands of websites via Google Analytics. To opt out of this, install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on (Beta), which Google offers for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera. However, some sites use different analytics software or track visitors in other ways you will be unaware of. Ghostery may help reduce these.

Finally, Facebook Connect is a potential privacy problem because it "allows users to 'connect' their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site".

In general, the more you do online – social networking, cloud computing etc – the more your privacy and security are at risk. Reducing that risk involves effort and inconvenience, so it's up to you to find an acceptable compromise

smartphones based on Google's Android operating system.

Google's new technology mimics some of the key features of popular social networking services like Twitter and Facebook

Gmail is the third most popular web-based email in the world

the large pool of Gmail users.

There's always been a giant social network underneath Gmail,"

176.5 million unique visitors in December

flag as viewable to everyone

utomatically indexed by Google's search engine

be available within Google's recently launched real-time search results.

users can also keep messages private by sharing only with customized groups of friends and colleagues.

users can easily share content from various Google online properties like photo-sharing service Picasa and video site YouTube.

Content from certain third-party services such as Twitter can also be shared

Buzz is not currently able to display messages that originated on Facebook

"The fact that Gmail did not connect and allow broadcasts out to Twitter and Facebook could be a real challenge to them

Google hopes to jumpstart its social networking push

the Orkut social network in 2004

Google has tried to ride the social networking wave before

ailed to attract as many users as social giants like Facebook and MySpace in the United States.

Google is following in the footsteps of Yahoo

has seen lackluster results according to analysts.

Google appears to be putting a heavy emphasis on mobile and location-based capabilities

a special mobile application for Buzz that will run on smartphones based on Google's Android software, Windows Mobile and the Symbian operating system.

Facebook has dealt with many privacy issues in its nine years on the Web, but unlike most of the past issues that deal with broader concerns like “data mining,” the new promoted posts service could have a greater impact on individuals, like its increased potential for cyberbullying.One problem is your friend doesn’t need your explicit permission to promote your posts. So, for instance, if one of my friends from college decides to promote an old embarrassing photo of me, I won’t be able to prevent the picture from getting to the top of the News Feed for a large percentage of my friends.

We’ve reached out to Facebook to talk about any safeguards that will be put in place to prevent cyber bullying, but they didn’t get back to us by the time this article went up.In addition, there’s no way to determine who promoted the post, so, as TechCrunch notes, a friend promoting an article written by me could be perceived as a shameless plug by me in an effort get more of my friends to check out my article (which is totally true by the way).However, Facebook notes there are a lot of benefits to the service. A Facebook spokesperson released a statement to AllFacebook on Friday, describing the feature:

“If your friend is running a marathon for charity and has posted that information publicly, you can help that friend by promoting their post to all of your friends,” the post said. “Or if your friend is renting their apartment out and she tells her friends on Facebook, you can share the post with the people you and your friend have in common so that it shows up higher in news feed and more people notice it.”As you can see, Facebook’s new feature has a number of potentially beneficial uses like fundraising for a friends’ charity or publicizing events to increase attendance, and can even make somewhat tedious tasks like finding an apartment be a little less difficult.

Facebook will want to monitor this new feature to see how it’s used. It has the potential to be really lucrative and turn Facebook into a network more like Reddit, where popular posts dominate the front page on a merit basis, but it could be used maliciously to embarrass or play pranks on friends – only time will tell. Facebook is planning on emphasizing its mobile platform in 2013, and it will be interesting to see if the Promoted Posts feature will be included in its mobile plans. In the company’s most recent earnings report, Facebook said mobile ad revenue accounts for 23 percent of its total ad revenue. To contact the editor, e-mail: editor@ibtimes.com

However, when you use Facebook you give it the right to use information "in connection with the services and features we provide to you and other users like your friends, our partners, the advertisers that purchase ads on the site, and the developers that build the games, applications, and websites you use".

Jill Lesser, executive director of the Center for Copyright Information said in an interview with On the Media that the program is meant to abet the "casual infringer".

McSherry said that people engaged in wholesale commercial infringement wouldn't be fazed by the system because they are familiar with ways around the system.

The newest attempt to thwart illegal filesharing in the United States launched Monday and while the "six strikes and you're out" initiative seems to offer light penalties, digital rights advocates are concerned that it lacks transparency.

Copyright Alert System (CAS)

was devised by a coalition of internet service providers (ISPs), content owners and the US government to curb illegal downloading by alerting "casual infringers" when illegal filesharing is detected on their IP address.

Initially, the alerts are intended to be educational.

. If pirating continues to happen through the IP address, users will receive the message again, followed by messages that ask them to confirm they have seen the alerts. The fifth and sixth alert are called mitigation alerts and will temporarily slow users' internet speeds, depending on the ISP.

It's certainly not how we should be doing copyright policy,

it's a private copyright system and it doesn't have the protections and balances that the public copyright system has.

to ensure that it fairly identifies copyright violations is a former lobbyist

McSherry said that people engaged in wholesale commercial infringement wouldn't be fazed by the system because they are familiar with ways around the system

This failed to have a significant effect on pirating, and the industry stopped suing these type of casual users several years ago.

There is no reason why an appropriate remedy that introduces fair rankings should in any way impair the user experience.

that Google, with more than 90% of the search market in Europe, is overwhelmingly dominant.

Effective remedies will aim to protect competition for the future but need also to acknowledge the past. Google has continued to expand and exploit its position during the period of the investigation and it will be necessary to find a solution that tackles that past misbehaviour and reintroduces something approaching a level playing field.

Free versions come with ads, but for a price, people can upgrade to the ad-free experience.

It's also possible that over the next five to 10 years, people's attitudes toward privacy and their data will change, and they'll be willing to share more personal information

Not everyone will want the same level of privacy,

"Do not track" seems like a clear, smart option to give consumers

Companies that provide free services, such as search engines or social networks, have to strike the right balance between respecting their customers' privacy concerns and serving advertisers.

It's also possible that over the next five to 10 years, people's attitudes toward privacy and their data will change, and they'll be willing to share more personal information, attached to their real-world identity, in exchange for more heavily customized computing experiences.

But access to this "free" information on the Internet, as everyone acknowledges as soon as it is pointed out, is not gratis.

The leading beneficiaries of all these charges are the big multi-platform companies, the pipes for content and digital services

the devices that connect us to search engines, countless websites, social media, and e-mail bring us vast amounts of content for which we do not pay separately.

100 million Americans do not have high speed Internet at home, largely because of high costs and the lack of available infrastructure.

the Internet is the key to economic growth in the 21st century

One promising initiative, at least as it applies to speed and access, comes from Google Fiber. This is a project the company is developing in Kansas City as a trial of what would be a far faster broadband network using fiber-optic communication.

No other company can match Google's projected speed, but the price it is planning to charge for that service so far is higher than slower providers

For all the progress in delivering information and entertainment in the Internet era, Americans deserve and should demand something closer to the ideal of what is possible with our technology.

Another useful feature is that CrashPlan keeps copies of all versions of your files and even those you have deleted.  This means, for example, that you can go back and retrieve a version of a PowerPoint presentation you were using last year if you decide you liked it better than a more recent one.  And if you've ever accidentally deleted or lost a file you know how aggravating and time-consuming it is to recreate it. That's not a worry with CrashPlan.

Many cloud storage services claim to offer online collaboration features but Mindjet Connect is different because helping people get work done together regardless of their locations is its forte, not some add-on function.

Huddle Sync, Huddle's enterprise file synchronization platform, is different from consumer sync tools because it was built to meet enterprise security and compliance requirements and uses learning algorithms and predictive technology to fully sync only certain files. Not only that but it keeps track of where company data is stored and who has synced what files, as well as provides full audit trails for every single file.

Huddle Sync is currently in private beta but you can register at the site if you want to try it out.

One important element of this is the security of the service itself. Although the consumer rarely suffers directly when online services are exposed, scary media stories do mean that everyone in the dot.com world has to work that bit harder to build the necessary trust.

The prediction of Web 2.0's demise was made by Christopher Mims, a technology commentator who writes for the MIT journal Technology Review. He started by typing Web 2.0 into Google Trends search engine

As it happens, Web 2.0 does mean something, even though the definition gets a bit fuzzy round the edges. It first appeared in 1999

if the internet itself was the platform on which Web 1.0 – the first version of the Web as a simple publication system – was built, then Web 2.0 was the platform on which new, innovative  applications could be built.

Online mapping systems

Image-hosting services

social networking services such as MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Cloud computing

So one way of looking at Web 2.0 is simply to say that it's "the web done properly"

The big question, of course, is what will Web 3.0 be like? And the answer, I suppose, is that if we knew that then we wouldn't be here.