YOU WOULD never sign a legal document without reading it through first, would you?

When you bought your house, you read the contract carefully to ensure there were no hidden clauses that gave the neighbours the right to use your bathroom or sunbathe on your lawn, didn’t you?

If the answer is “no” you will not be alone. For many people a kind of word blindness descends when a lengthy tract is presented and they decide, for a quiet life, to scribble their name at the end after only the most cursory of glances.

The chances are that when you opened your Facebook account you didn’t study the 3,800-word Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, let alone the 9,300 words of its Data Use Policy.

Whether or not, by failing to do so, you have unwittingly given away your legal rights to the sharing of the personal data you, or your friends or relatives, upload about you on Facebook is one for the lawyers to argue over.

But whether you accepted the terms or not, you have potentially placed a great deal of information about yourself at the mercy of commercial and political organisations to exploit.

The issue has been thrown into sharp relief by the furore surrounding the allegations that 50 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by British data firm Cambridge Analytica.

The arguments about the rights and wrongs of who used what information, how they used it and whether it was legally or morally correct to do so are the subject of political investigation on both sides of the Atlantic.

But the fundamental issue is that some big firms have acquired enormous wealth by using the internet to hoover up information about us which they add to every time we use their services or answer questionnaires or quizzes online.

There are many who fear that so much data has now been amassed about us that we are losing control of our own online identities.

Dr Andrea Cullen, digital security expert at the University of Bradford, thinks we should be very concerned about the growing use of our personal data for commercial gain or political purposes.

Dr Cullen, director of the Cyber Security Interdisciplinary Centre, says: “We should definitely be worried. As an EU citizen the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which comes into effect at the end of May does go some way to help address this.

“Under the regulation, organisations will have to be very clear and explicit what they are doing with people's personal data. In addition, they must obtain explicit and affirmative consent for it.

“However, the key to being safer online and having more control of our personal data is to take personal responsibility for what and where we share it. We can no longer assume that the safety of our information is anyone else’s responsibility. There needs to be a shift in culture brought about by awareness raising.”

But can we actually make our personal data safe online?

“Personal data can never really be considered as safe online, if by ‘safe’ you mean only to be seen by those that you want it to be seen by,” says Dr Cullen. “Security looks at a number of things but mainly confidentiality, integrity and availability of data. In this scenario, clearly, the confidentiality of the day has been compromised.

“However, more often than not, when people share their information on social media sites, they are unaware how accessible it is by other people and organisations. Even with good privacy settings etc you are only as secure as your most vulnerable friend or connection. The golden rule is to never share anything that you would not be happy for everyone to see.”

As a society, we’re used to thinking that the state and the rule of law will protect us but is there sufficient oversight to ensure data usage rules are followed?

“The information commissioner’s office has oversight over organisational compliance with the GDPR,” says Dr Cullen. “They have invested in resource to deal with data breaches which will inevitably occur after the end of May. However, there needs to be more done to raise awareness so that people understand what their rights are within this regulation.”

So what can the individual do right now if they are concerned, or what should they do to head off future problems?

“They should assume that anything that is online is visible and delete anything that they would not want to be publicly available,” advises Dr Cullen.

“They need to reduce the amount of personal information they share, such as date of birth, likes and interests. In addition, they should avoid using apps and quizzes within social media sites.”

You could, of course, just quit Facebook. But most users agree it’s a fabulous free service and, in any case, it’s just the tip of the iceberg: Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp and Google owns YouTube, so you’d have to stop using all of those, too. And most of the apps on your smartphone collect data about you.

The only answer must surely be to tame the beast. But only time will tell if we are able to take back control and put the genie back in the bottle.