Apple and Facebook should not commodify pregnancy

It will also, however, breed vastly upscaled versions of today's Big Data technologies. Our personal choices will become even more saleable 'products'.

This will happen without adequate regulation, for legislation almost always lags well behind any growth in technological capability.

A public reaction to all of this will likely see the tech giants trying to sell us back our privacy, despite the fact that they?ve been culpable in its removal.

Some of the next big products from online companies will offer information brokerage, in the form of platforms or apps designed to help us better map and control who knows what about us online.

Companies like Apple, Facebook and Google already behave as if the information we list on their platforms belongs to them, rather than to us.

The European Court of Justice?s so-called Right to be Forgotten ruling, though arguably flawed in some respects, challenges that thinking. Yet some of the larger tech companies are already pushing back hard, recognising a potential threat to their lucrative trade in data.

Behemoths like Apple and Facebook need to understand that there are limits to our gullibility and we will not always be willing participants in our own commodification.