Today the Wall Street Journal listed all the data Facebook can grab when you upload a photo, based on Facebook's privacy and data collection policies. The list illustrates what we've said before: Facebook doesn't need to spy on your through your microphone, because you already let it spy on everything else you do.

We often wish to share electronic documents with friends, colleagues, business or government, and the software application we use to prepare these documents will save them in a particular format.

Any application that later loads the document will also need to be able to understand this format. If an organisation can control the format, and convince people to use it, then they can use this as a very powerful tool to create a monopoly in the market.

At Lifehacker, we've delved into data sharing plans in the past as it is something telcos are increasingly getting involved with. Previously, Optus only allowed customers to share data across its mobile MyPlan service so pure mobile data plan users were deprived of this privilege. But the telco is now allowing users to share data across tablets, dongles and mobile phones on its Data Pool feature.

When Telstra launched its consumer business data sharing plans last year, we were underwhelmed, largely because of the $10 per device per month fee to share data across multiple devices. Telstra is now offering that option on new EasyShare business plans, and it's marginally better value.