Studies have shown that, as we store our contacts electronically, the quantity of numbers we can now remember by heart is decreasing. The kids today, it seems, can barely remember their own phone number, instead relying solely on their phones for these details as well as the collective intelligence of their peers.

In place of phone numbers, the place in our brain for remembering important strings of information is now reserved for website passwords, lots of them: GMail, Hotmail, Bebo, MSN, Yahoo! and dozens more.

With new sites and services popping up online on a daily basis, information overload is becoming a problem and many sites are reporting that the volume of emails sent to remind people of their passwords is going up. There are calls from all quarters to have a single sign-on for websites and most web companies agree with this, but they cannot agree on what this system should be, as they all want control of the system.

A new system called OpenID bills itself as being the solution to all our password woes. OpenID allows you to log into hundreds of different websites using just one username and password; once logged into one of these sites, you are logged into the rest.

Additional benefits to this system are that you can choose what information a site stores about you, meaning you can allow one website to know all your contact details and restrict another website to knowing just your email address and username and nothing else.

For the securityconscious and those who worry about a single point of failure, OpenID even allows you to run your own personal login system on your own website, meaning that once you keep your own website running, your login details won't disappear.

While more and more websites are using this system, none of the web giants wants to know about it. Google, MSN, Yahoo! , Amazon and others don't want you to control your login details, they want to control them. It makes sense for them to fight for this, as most of these login systems store web usage statistics combined with profile data on your age, location and likes and dislikes, which is pure gold to these companies. Like gold they don't want to share the treasure with others.

With profile data linked to web usage statistics, these companies can inform their advertisers exactly what types of people surf what websites, and the more data they have, the more money they can squeeze out of ad companies that want to make ads that are as targeted and specific as possible.

If we were shrewd as a group of web users, we would create a union to represent our web use rights, and negotiate with the big web companies so we too would get a kickback from the revenue they generate. It is our usage data and profile data that are allowing the likes of Google, MSN and Facebook to increase the prices they charge for ads, which now bring in billions of dollars every quarter.

While they may argue that we get very good web services for free . . . and we do . . . they can still afford to give something back to us.

As the industrial revolution brought about workers' rights, perhaps the digital revolution will see a new Jim Larkin fighting for our online rights? Or if not Big Jim, what about a Tony Soprano?