Social software is big, very big. Big used to be the $580m that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp paid for mySpace two years ago but now big is the rumoured $6bn Microsoft might pay to acquire Facebook, the new wunderkind of social networks.

The creators of Facebook realised recently that even if they are the number one social networking site online, they still won't get the full attention of all their users who also use a dozen other websites to interact with people and media on a daily basis.

To counter that, Facebook have now made it possible to load all these other websites directly into your Facebook profiles. Now users can display their blog posts from their blog, they can display the drunken pics that they uploaded to Flickr, show the embarassing videos they have from their YouTube profile and so much more.

In the world where people never pledge full allegiance to one site, it made sense to drag display them all in a single scrapbook. This is the idea behind 'lifestreaming' and is a dream come true for those that gloriously show off every facet of their life and the millions of lurkers who are willing to tune into such dross.

Lifestreaming, like the movie Being John Malkovich, will allow you to climb inside the head of someone and experience their day via a digital smorgasboard of public text messages, blog posts, GPS-tagged photos and (thanks to mobile broadband and tiny videocameras) a live video stream of them as they move around their world.

Every person can now be their own TV channel and everything they do will leave digital footprints across the web on multiple websites.

Something like this is a complete surrender of privacy but as all these services stress, everyone opts in to this. However many of these sites seem to be like the 'Hotel California' that the Eagles sang about: lovely places but can your data ever leave and what if your images were uploaded without permission?

Some of us might like our privacy and may never use these super-fad social networks but we'll still show up in the peripheries of videos and photos and mentions in blog posts and texts. There may already be multiple websites where our image is stored online and we don't even know it. If we do become aware of such things, we might have to go to two or four or even 12 different websites to try and have our data removed.

When Google recently released street-level photos of cities in America, lots of people did not want the world to see them and asked for their images to be removed but Google demanded a scan of your drivers licence and a letter from you before they'd even consider removing your picture. That's just Google and there are possibly hundreds more websites also hosting images and videos and text snippets about you.

TCD Law Scholar Daithi Mac Sithigh points out the privacy implications of this:

"The real issue of legal uncertainty is in relation to other people posting pictures of you (and identifying you). In Ireland, there is not a clear 'right to prevent a photograph being taken' although again with our very pro-plaintiff tradition of defamation law that would be the obvious port of call if you appeared in an embarrassing situation in someone's photo album."

Is our future one where only the very rich have the resources to fight to keep their lives private while the rest of us don baseball caps, surgical masks, scarves and large dark sunglasses in order not to appear on Channel 457?