Even though I already have a section on site purpose, I believe privacy does deserve a special mention. In essence, privacy is a fundamental right that must be protected at all costs save in some highly specific, provable cases of criminality. That's it, what you do is otherwise your own business and should stay that way.
I don't know or care who you are. I don't know or care how or why you've come to this page or website or when you'll be coming back. Sounds mean? I'm actually trying to protect all of us by adopting this low-effort attitude. I could potentially be subpoenaed at some point in the future and asked, "Who visits your website?" to which I can honestly reply, "Someone visited my website?" By not knowing anything about my traffic, I am legally protected and I am protecting my visitors from unpleasant consequences. But, this isn't how tech giants envision the internet. Oh, no.
Social media networks and content aggregators represent a blatant breach of privacy on a continuing, automated basis. What would otherwise be sheer surveillance is legally softened by having a smart machine tag and track you across websites and products, usually through a connecting account. All of this is admitted in Terms of Service, often explained away as "to better understand our visitors". That's only a half-truth because the ultimate goal is creating a detailed psychological profile that is meant to result in a perfectly timed ad that will make you believe there's such a thing as serendipity.
Without privacy there's no human dignity either. I just read Karlo Štajner's "7,000 days in Siberia" account of having been kidnapped by Soviet brutalizers NKVD and shipped off to the Norilsk labor camp near the Arctic circle to mine ore for 20 years. What I found striking is that NKVD regularly stripped down prisoners as the fastest way to deprive them of human dignity and make them submit to any amount of degradation and torture. Your privacy is your boundary between your inner peace and the outside chaos. Who and what you are is meant to be kept private and revealed only in strict confidence to people whom you trust; those who infringe on your privacy are villains.
Once eroded, a person's privacy is nearly impossible to restore, with a stigma resulting from the revelation of their mental innards clinging on them like moss. Stay away from mega-websites, social media and content aggregators; if you have to use them, avoid using a connecting account and preferably use a specific phone, browser, PC or tablet that are only meant for that service. Don't upload your real information, put a fake profile picture wherever possible and lie all the time. John McAfee is already doing this on Twitter, creating elaborate fake narratives just to stay in touch with his audience while keeping his privacy intact. Your goal online is to confuse the machine tracking you, not the people you're interacting with.