Accounts
Nowadays people are doing a lot of their daily activities online. A personal account is needed in almost all the cases to get access to all the features of the online services. If you look at yourself, there might be a lot more accounts with personal data on the internet then you think. Think about your average mail-accounts such as Gmail and Hotmail (Windows Live). Or social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter. All your personal data is stored on these website, but that was also your intention. You log on to these sites to access personal data, but how is this data protected? How is your personal information stored? What are they doing with your data, and where are they using it for? Read more about it below.
Take Facebook for example. Most users log on to the site on a daily base and keep their relatives and friends up to date about their daily activities. In the privacy-settings you can set permissions to who can view your information. What some people don't realise, is when a service like Facebook is free to use, you are the product. Facebook keeps their services free due to the use of personal ads. The advertisements are based on your activities on Facebook. For example, if you like football-pages the ads will be based on football. This is a simple example of how your information gets used by external companies, some people don't even know that these kinds of activities are done by Facebook.