Pumeco, I don't have a smart phone. I actually don't have a cellphone because I don't need one. When I did, I just bought burners. Mobile contracts in Canada are insanely expensive and binding. No thanks. Ditto to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I do have Google accounts. About 15 of them. Real name, DOB, etc? Are you kidding? I started on the net in 1990, long before the web existed, and back then your .edu address was linked to your legal name, but nothing else was because no one thought that was important. Then again, the net was being run on public dollars, not advertizing. So I challenge Google to figure out which of my email addresses contains real information, if any. As for my browsing history, were I a political activist, I would worry and take greater steps to cover my tracks. However, I'm not.

Renderosity has some real info because I have made purchases here using a credit card. In other words, Rendo knows my legal name. Nothing else. 

And there's the real info leak: if you use credit cards to make purchases, your bank has far more legitimate ironclad and damning knowledge about you than any social network, and banks have been known to use that information to charge higher interest rates based on purchases (for ex: lots of alcohol = higher interest rates, I guess because there is a supposed correlation between alcohol consumption and defaulting on credit card payments).

As for social media, well, people DO give too much information away. In British Columbia, auto insurance is coordinated by a single company, and they will do ANYTHING, from sending investigators to your home to physically watch you to trolling your social media accounts in order to try to discredit an insurance claim. In that environment, it's silly to be incautious about what you make public.

But I'm curious about what damning information MS is supposed to have on me and how they are supposed to be using it. I mean, I suppose it's possible that every single copy of Windows contains keyloggers, etc, but if that were the case, the poor buggers are drowning in so much data it would take them centuries to make any sense of it.

Again, if you're doing anything that could be considered "subversive" -- like volunteering to help people get out the vote (heh! I jest, but it's not really a joke) -- then exercising some caution is wise, and the more subversive your activity is, the more cautious you should be. But me? I'm too apathetic to be interesting to anyone. The worst you could probably say is, OMG look at how much she spends on CGI content!!! [And ever since my card was disabled because its details were stolen in the Sony hack, I haven't bothered to get a new one, even though a new number was issued. I've been using disposable cards. So even that avenue of info leak no longer exists in my case.)

Edit: As for whether the NSA is capable of spying on any given person, I'd say, of course they are. If you are a priority target, they are largely inescapable. If Angela Merkel's phone can be tapped, anyone's can be. But if you're just an ordinary person, the chance that they would spend the sort of effort to spy on you that they would spend on the head of the fourth largest economy in the world is pretty freakin' remote. I'd worry more about being killed by a meteorite falling from the sky.

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PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.