After the experience of having a comment I made on Glenn Greenwald's Guardian comments to one of his posts decrying the violation of online privacy tapped by whoever it was choosing ads for me to see, I decided to test just how much online privacy I had. I removed all of the cookies from my computer and went to do something I've never done and never had anything to do with, sign up for Face Book using an assumed name, a false location in another state, date of birth, my gender, everything. I signed up and as soon as I had confirmed it at an e-mail address (also under a pseudonym and false location, etc.) I seldom use, I got a list of people I might want to contact.
Every single person in my near immediate family, up to my great-nieces who are on Face Book, were on that list, some of them living clear across the country, many of them not living in the same town I do. And speaking of that, there were people who live in the same town and went to the same high school I did, even though I'd claimed to live in another state. People with the same names of people I know but who I don't contact by e-mail, who I never mentioned online, some of whom I haven't thought about in years. It was pretty flabbergasting and I'm not a sucker for the myth of online privacy.
Try it yourself if, like me, you've never had anything to do with Face Book. I don't know, it just might work with Twitter and other things I don't have anything to do with either.
So, another nail in the coffin of the myth of online privacy.
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