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Freely divulging information about yourself on Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and other websites causes your personal data to feed directly into the lucrative business models of information brokers and data scrapers, as a new video from identity management firm Reputation.com vividly depicts.

Clear Cloud Live asked Michael Farr, founder and CEO of One-Reputation.com, to elaborate on the drivers behind this rapidly emerging piece of our digital economy.

CC: Why did Reputation.com decide to do the  video?

FARR: The current architecture of the Web has created a privacy horror show for individuals. Every day we input vast amounts of information online — whether it's personal information such as a Social Security number, home address, household income range, age range, political leaning, gender and age of children, financial and health records — or seemingly innocuous website visits, connections to friends, searches, tweets, comments, posts, or "likes" of restaurants and hobbies.

This information is being collected, compromised and commoditized without our consent. The purpose of this video is to increase awareness of what's going on behind the scenes and help people understand that when they're supposedly getting a free lunch on the Web, they are actually the product being sold.

CC: What is the main point your video is intended to convey?

FARR: Marketers, data brokers and online advertisers are in a race to the privacy bottom. The more personal data points they absorb online, the higher their CPMs, the higher their revenue. We can't rely on the self-policing mechanisms of these industries to protect consumers; it goes against their business goals.

Internet users often have little recourse if personally identifiable data is made available and scraped online. There is currently no national law requiring data companies to let people easily control, remove, or change personal information about themselves. We are working to educate individuals on how their information is used online in order to stimulate change.

CC: Who are the information brokers referred to in your  video?

FARR: Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has compiled  this list  of the data brokers and data scrapers,

CC: Who are the companies buying this data?

FARR: The emerging business of Web scraping provides some of the raw material for a rapidly expanding data economy. That's according to The Wall Street Journal's What They Know series. Marketers spent $4.7 BILLION on online and offline data in 2009, according to the New York management consulting firm Winterberry Group. Spending on data from online sources is set to more than double, to $840 million in 2012 from $410 million in 2009.

CC: Have insurance companies, in fact, been also buying this type of profile data?

FARR: The Journal  said that it is happening in a story about how insurers test data profiles to identify risky clients, and The New York Times has also written about data sharing in the health industry.

CC: Have employers started buying this data?

FARR: One company that screens job applicants for employers, InfoCheckUSA in Florida, began offering limited social-networking data — some of it scraped — to employers about a year ago.