Someone is watching you right now. Maybe. If you’re browsing the web, odds are that you’re being tracked, logged and audited; this sounds quite painful, but it may not be that bad. The recent coverage of Facebook’s changes to its privacy policy have highlighted how important we consider the security of our information to be, but is it all a case of molehill-to-mountain transmogrification?

Let’s be clear: I don’t want pictures of myself or my family transmitted across the Internet for anybody and everybody to see, but yet I upload photos to Facebook. Why? Because I want to share them with my friends and because the risk of them getting loose is small. Even if they did, is it really that bad if a picture of me in shorts on a beach got into a stranger’s hands (it might not be a pleasant experience for them, however)? It was my choice to put them on an Internet site, and I knew the risks. Ultimately, if we want to keep our information totally secure, then we shouldn’t be putting it onto the Internet.

We shouldn’t absolve companies of any responsibility at all, of course. It does often seem as if businesses and government don’t realise how portable information has become nowadays. It wouldn’t have been so easy years ago for councils to misplace whole filing cabinets of records, but when the same amount of information can be stored on a memory card the size of my fingernail it’s not quite so easy to keep track of it. There have been so many reports of data going walkabout, from banks sticking statements in bin liners outside the back door to MoD laptops being stolen at train stations that sometimes it does make you wonder whether it would be easier to report the things that hadn’t gone missing.

In the end, though, are we perhaps guilty of chasing an unattainable ideal of privacy that never existed in the first place? As everywhere we walk there are CC TV cameras, as every conversation we have on a telephone is logged in terms of duration and destination if not contents, and as most of the web-sites we visit are tracking our IP address and what we click on, then staying completely private would be a tough enough job for James Bond, never mind the rest of us. All the furore about identity fraud has made us a little paranoid, but yet oddly only in a way about what companies do with our data, not what we do with it – we seem to becoming more willing to pass it out to all and sundry but yet expect others to take responsibility for it. Ultimately, if I post a geo-tagged update on my public Twitter feed telling the world that I’m sunning it up on the Costa del Sol, then I can hardly be surprised if somebody comes along and breaks into my house because they know I’m not there.