Column: What Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and Facebook have shared in transparency reports

If you’re of the mind that what you do online is your business - and your business alone - you should probably get offline.

Unfortunately, unless you’ve learned how to live off of the grid in, say, a floating cabin, the Internet is one of the key weapons in your arsenal of daily survival.

As such, your life post-CompuServe and America Online is stored in a humongous network of worldwide data servers.

And, whether by security breach, government surveillance, or the power of not-so-secret, super-secret National Security Letters (NSLs), that also means your life is basically up for grabs.

Tech companies feel pretty bad about their court-ordered loose lips - take, for example, the 192,499 instances of being asked to cough up their users’ information and content to the FBI between 2003 and 2006 alone.

So, for the past few years, they have started to get out in front of the problem.

Full story at Minyanville.