Millions of internet users connect to Facebook,Twitter and YouTube, do shopping online or comment on blogs and articles on news websites.

These activities became quite common and most of the time this leave traces and the user does not always know the consequences of this: some personal information, such as the age, address, birthday and shopping habits are collected and used by commercial websites for commercial purposes. This even led to a new type of job, called the "data miners": they capture and manipulate your personal data to provide advertisers with such information.

A report from The Guardian said that an Austrian law student Max Schrems asked Facebook for a copy of all the data it had on him. He received a CD of 1,200 pages of information, some of it consisting of items he had "deleted" from the site, .

The amount and degree of information contained on Schrems's CD is staggering -- rejected friend requests, a list of "defriendings," a log of all the Facebook chats he had ever had, and just about everything else you could imagine. Deleting items didn't matter. Absolutely everything was there even if .you think it is already deleted.

The worst thing is that such data can be used by the police to investigate about you and this is completely legal. So be careful on what you post on the Internet and to whom you publish it to!

And there are even worse things that you are not even aware of! If Facebook claims not to sell your information to corporates, your activity on Facebook and other websites can be tracked and reused.

On most non-paying websites, your online activity is being tracked by advertising sites that record your connections through cookies and other tracking systems without you knowing it. This information is stored on servers that represent loads of data. Then websites you connect to will display advertising banners to suit your taste and match with what you have watched on the Internet. The information of your connection would indeed have being cross-checked with other databases (age, geolocalization ...) and software by data miners who deal with 85% of data users information on the Internet.

Web users feel thus more and more manipulated. A recent European directive attempts to control this spying on the Internet, but it is very difficult to implement, with so many websites and devices constantly evolving.

If you want your Internet connections to be secure and anonymous, choose a VPN. A VPN service encrypts your Internet connections and keeps private the sites you have visited and the information you have left on them.

Any information you send will directly goes into your secure virtual tunnel. With a VPN service you can easily direct your traffic as coming from the different countries, while your ISP will not even know about your online activity.