As you may or may not have heard, today is Data Privacy Day. While ordinarily I would dismiss this as the same pointless guff as Talk Like a Pirate Day or St. Patrick’s Day, this year it is actually fairly pertinent.

With more people moving to the cloud and putting direct control of their sensitive data in the hands of others, being aware of who has your data, and what you are allowing them to do with it, has become increasingly important. Just last week Facebook put on hold plans to make users’ phone numbers and addresses accessible to third parties, a move which would have gone relatively unnoticed had it not been for a few inquisitive bloggers.

A few days prior to this, stinky skincare shop Lush had their website compromised, putting customer’s personal information and credit card details at risk. The issue of data security has become such a big deal that the Information Commissioners Office has been given powers in recent months to heavily fine any organisation – public or private – should they not adhere to the Data Protection Act.

Personally, my biggest concern is someone gaining illicit access to my Google account. Having thrown myself fully into cloud existence around 2 years ago, I now rely on no less than 35 Google services for both business and pleasure. Stored within my GMail account are registration emails for just about every non-Google service I use (some complete with password), my Google Contacts contains the contact information of just about everyone I know, and my Google Calendar (and calendars shared with me) would let any would-be intruder know where I, members of my family, my partner and my boss would be at any time in the next couple of weeks. The intruder would also be able to find my home address through Google Maps, my allergies and prescriptions through Google Health, and perhaps even my current location through Google Latitude.

Google, for their part, have some of the best account security around, and I complement that by changing my password regularly between random strings of characters and punctuation. Nonetheless, the thought of someone gaining access to that amount of personal data gives me the willies.

So, what are your biggest data privacy worries? Facebook giving it away for free? Being caught having an affair because of a FourSquare check-in? Let us know in the comments.

Photo by Rob Pongsajapan – CC