Consumers anonymous?

The extraordinary rise of social networking and other forms of online activity has brought the issue of online privacy to the forefront of contemporary public debate surrounding consumer protection. More specifically the practice of "data mining" has received much media attention, as consumers' personal information is being bought and sold at an unprecedented rate. Private sector companies often aggregate personal information about their customers for internal purposes and analysis. Some companies may sell their aggregated data for profit. Other companies' business models are founded on combining various sets of aggregated data with sets of publicly available information in order to produce valuable data sets that can help companies make accurate assumptions about their target customers or engage in "data mining" practices.