Even in its younger days, the Web was already invading your privacy. Forbes senior editor Adam Penenberg discovered this himself just before the turn of the millennium when he challenged a private eye to use the internet to dig up as much information on him as possible—a challenge the gumshoe met with Marlowe-esque enthusiasm, uncovering (among much else) Penenberg's Social Security number and the balance of his Merrill Lynch cash-management account. "The spread of the Web... will make most of the secrets you have more instantly available than ever before, ready to reveal themselves in a few taps on the keyboard," Penenberg wrote. Paying a detective to dig up details seems pretty quaint now, of course, when tech giants such as Google and Facebook routinely collect our most intimate information and monetize it.
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