My young daughter has developed the trait of cupping her hands around a piece of paper while she writes. It's something that seems to automatically happen to us in those early years.

Another name for it is privacy, basically a visual response to "I don't want you to see this information". Do you remember all those maths tests you did as children? Hiding the answers to universe shattering matters like your seven times table and long division.

As we grow older our trust widens, slowly. What's happening now is that we are being encouraged to share information. It didn't start with the rise of social networks.

In the late 1990s, when the internet was really starting to take shape, there was a huge uproar and rebellion about cookies (those little files that are written onto your computer). They held information the website you visit needed to remember if you returned.

It was real basic stuff like your name or a basket of items. All well, until marketing teams realised you could track where people had visited.

Then the game changed into finding ways to track you.

Since then tracking the trends on normal mundane things has been on the rise. From the websites we visit to the shopping we do (yes the Clubcard is there to track, learn and inform - it's an amazing piece of marketing).

The leap from tracking to sharing is just starting. Foursquare, Gowalla and a surge of other social based location applications are constantly tracking, the only change is that users are willingly giving the information to them.

It goes beyond that, we can now share our Amazon purchases, even going as far as the contents of our credit card statements.

Obviously you have to opt in to start giving this information away. Once you do that, then you are in line for incentives from advertisers who have now got a picture of your spending habits.

The time when the line is crossed is when you are being tracked without real prior knowledge. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has now become the good guy gone bad after releasing the new 'like' button. To say you like something is to acknowledge and add to a trend. Facebook has had a like function for a few years but in the last month it has extended out to everyday websites.

Now Facebook can track outside of its own site data about you and sell this on to advertisers.

I believe this is just the start. The value of Twitter is in the data, now they have introduced advertising results on search pages we'll now start to see the measurement of your tweets against results.

If you want a career in computing make it in data mining and statistics, not programming.

Jase Bell is a software developer and founder of Data Sentiment (www.twitter.com/jasebell )