Faceboogle
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Who is the Faceboogle?
Well, the Faceboogle has many faces and facets.
The undisputed leader of social technology. Owns permission to use and sell the things millions of people share, the pictures, the real-life events, the public comments and all the private mails. It's also the #1 chat and messaging platform on the planet. If you put Facebook on your mobile phone, it owns your phonebook, too. And it's all for sale, everything you do on it.
Google knows what you search and combines it with all the emails you send to people on its market-leading G-Mail platform. Google has a very subtle way of collecting information on everyone's web activities: Javascript files from the Google servers are included on huge numbers of websites, making your computer report back to Google whenever it cares to know. And now it can even collect information on how millions of people use their mobile phones. So Google knows all the things people don't worry about, because they didn't post it on Facebook.
Microsoft
It's still the leader in proprietary computing systems, known to provide backdoors, but Microsoft too has a completely legal way to know a lot of what humans think and do, by sending mail to and from the Hotmail service. With Messenger and Skype it also owns a large slice of instant messaging. And what about all the Skype conversations that are intended to be private?
Apple
With its leading proprietary mobile solutions it is increasingly getting an insight on what people do in their lives, not just what kind of music they listen to.
the Rest
And then there are so many big and small companies trying to achieve what the Faceboogles have achieved, like Dropbox luring people into using it as a computer backup – which effectively uploads their entire digital existence to the Dropbox servers, encrypted in transit, but stored and indexed on the servers in the clear. Even Twitter, which is by design very post-private, collects plenty of information from people reading articles on the web, simply because the page includes a Twitter button, next to the Facebook and G+ buttons.