Apps are a key entry point to your personal data. Apps want your location because that’s a valuable piece of data for advertisers. They also often have access to your address book and calendar, more valuable information for advertisers.

When you click “I agree” on the “terms and conditions” form, you are often giving away your rights to control what is done with your personal data.

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Whether you’re in a high-speed chase or stopping for every red light, your presence may be logged in a police database. Several communities in Washington County have police cars equipped with automated license plate recognition cameras. The plate cameras -- along with a handful in Pittsburgh, a few other suburbs and even distant Johnstown -- annually log around 2 million plates, times and locations that are stored for around five years on a computer server in North Strabane.

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Smart parking meters generally take money and credit/debit cards, and now some vendors offer service through mobile phones. Pittsburgh is seeking proposals from companies that allow people to pay with their smartphones. Parkmobile is one such company, and in State College parkers can use their cell phones to pay. Though it doesn’t share that data with advertisers without your permission, it retains the right to “disclose personal information about you to our affiliates.” That includes Parkmobile’s investors, ranging from Detroit-based venture capitalists Fontinalis Partners and Chicago-based parking concern SP Plus Corp., to Dutch firms Bluefield Investments and BCD Group, and German automaker BMW Group.

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Starbucks is using the My Starbucks Rewards program to keep customers coming back and to collect their data to market more effectively. But last year it was revealed that Starbucks was storing information in “clear text” (unencrypted) so that anyone with access to the phone could get passwords and usernames, as well as geolocation tracking points. The company remedied the situation only after security researcher Daniel Wood, who had tried to reach the company regarding the matter, published some of his findings.

Data breaches have put personal and financial information increasingly at risk. In 2010, you had a one in nine chance of becoming a victim of identity theft after your financial or personal information was swiped. By 2014, the odds increased to one in three, according to a survey of ID theft victims by the National Consumers League (NCL) and Javelin Strategy & Research.

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Employers own the phone and computer systems used by their employees so workers can have no expectation of private communication. A recent American Management Association survey found that a quarter of employers who monitor email have fired an employee over inappropriate emails. CMU researchers have found that most of the companies secretly tracking your web travels don’t say what they do with your data.

Amazon gets a trove of information not only when you buy online, but when you browse. It uses the data to instantly target ads, special offers and suggestions to you.

Fitbit and similar devices log vast amounts of data about the wearer, tracking the number of steps taken and calories burned, heart rate and sleep patterns among other information. After the wearer syncs the device with a smartphone or computer, the device links the information to a user account online and sends the information to the cloud, or a server, for safekeeping. However, the possibility of a breach or hack into the actual device exists.

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A huge amount of personal information is shared on social media, and users are often sharing data with a host of Friends and Friends of Friends, as well as with FB.

As CMU researcher Alessandro Acquisti puts it, we’ve “created de facto a database, incredibly accurate and incredibly large, of peoples' names and faces” that can be tapped by data brokers and the government.

Brick-and-mortar retail tracks you in the store as well as through your credit cards to learn shopping and buying habits.

How politicians can order, at inexpensive rates, demographically specific data that allows them to tailor ads to specific groups.

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