Online privacy is a minefield. Individuals and businesses are placing more information and more trust in a small group of powerful organisations. The email accounts of the Guardian, Times, Financial Times and Telegraph are all managed by Google. How far should the media trust Google to protect its off-the-record sources? Hundreds of millions trust Facebook with the minutiae of their daily lives. Tracking people down has never been easier than in the online era, and as individuals we have never had so little control over our privacy.

There are two ways to combat this. The first is limited: make sure the internet giants never have enough details to pass over. If setting up an anonymous Twitter account, use an anonymous email, use a tool like tor to hide your IP address, or even better, post from an internet cafe or similar. That's the limited, short-term fix. The bigger fix is to make sure it's in the interests of the companies managing the internet's main content sites to protect their users' privacy and resist incursion by the law.