Louis Gray: The End Of Privacy

Editor's Note: This is the first article in CNN's "End of Privacy" series. Join the conversation on Twitter by following @cnntech and #endofprivacy.

(CNN) -- An average internet user can dig up all kinds of details -- both juicy and mundane -- about the life of Louis Gray, a 33-year-old from Sunnyvale, California.

Like some tech early-adopters these days, Gray thinks privacy is a dying concept.

Among the personal nuggets a quick search reveals:

• Gray has three children: 2-and-a-half-year-old twins named Matthew and Sarah; and Braden, who is three months old and was born prematurely. The twins dressed up as Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, respectively, for Halloween this year -- and when they hear techno music, they jitter around like they're on nonexistent trampolines.

• Kristine Gray, Louis' history-loving, school-teaching wife, makes some interesting -- and potentially embarrassing -- purchases on their family credit card.

Among them: $109.25 per month to rent a breast milk pump from El Camino Hospital Maternal Connections. The last time she made such a purchase was November 29.

• Louis Gray -- who espouses Democratic politics and Mormon religious beliefs -- blogs about tech and has worked at an app company called my6sense since August. He spent $321.81 on groceries last month at Safeway. Also during November, he rented dozens of movies and TV shows from Netflix, including "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure" and "Dexter," a Showtime series about a serial killer. He goes to the dentist at Great Smiles Care Dental in Cupertino, California. He's been there once in the past two months.

• His phone of choice is the Samsung Epic 4G. Give him a ring. His number, as his public Facebook page blabs, is

408-646-2759.

Welcome to the world of public living -- where most everything about a person's habits, location and preferences is just a few clicks away.

While Louis Gray's case is a bit extreme -- he posts publicly to two blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Blippy, a site that automatically uploads credit card purchases from the family Visa -- this type of digital laundry-airing isn't all that uncommon these days. A half-billion people use the social network Facebook, and each of those users posts an average of 90 "pieces of content" on that site each month, according to the company.

As people share more information about themselves online, the internet, in effect, has created a public transcript of consciousness -- storing our thoughts, locations, social lives and memories in data warehouses all over the world.

This has enabled technological advances and shaped our social interactions.

It's also really freaked some people out.

Stealing your identity in 45 minutes
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With a dearth of established, effective methods to manage online privacy, and with digital marketers looking to profit from users' online lives, some privacy advocates and everyday Web users worry people have lost control of their identities on the internet.

The benefits of sharing

For Silicon Valley types -- always the early adopters of technology -- this trend toward all-public living is awesomely useful.