WIRED ON FRIDAY: There's no denying it, there is no shortage of personal information on the Net, but, as Danny O'Brien admits, we put most of it there ourselves

From the regular rants against closed-circuit TV cameras that preceded September 11th to the barely less contained mutterings over airport security that followed, Americans have always seemed a people that were rather fond of their privacy.

All the odder, then, to realise that the United States has very little in the way of data privacy legislation.

In marked contrast with Europe, corporations here can happily trade away in my personal details with no compunction at all to my right of access, or right of rectification, or any of the other rights that the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) so stoutly defends in Ireland.

What's even odder is how little difference that seems to make. True, the amount of junk mail I receive is prodigious compared to my old European postbag. I'm still not entirely sure how I got onto the National Rifle Association's mailing list - although the little American flag and copy of the second amendment they sent me was very welcome.

But, horse-trading of my mailing address among strange cults notwithstanding, I've felt little damage from being exposed to the raw forces of free trade in personal details.

That said, my presence in the databases of the Republic is still light. I haven't been here long enough to make much of a mark, as regular refusals for credit make clear (over here, I'm told, having no credit record at all is slightly worse than having a bad credit record). And perhaps I've not yet faced the kind of rampant abuse of privacy that the DPC was set up to prevent.

And perhaps if that happens, I'll be protected by the US's patchwork of self-regulation, industry-centred provisions, and state and federal laws. Or perhaps I'll slip through the cracks, like the dozens of Michigan patients who found their medical records placed for the public to see on the Web, or the thousands of employees who are monitored at work with no controls whatsoever.

But mostly, I think, the reason why it all seems the same to me, is because so much of my life is now online. And, like it or not, the US model for disregarding legislative solutions for privacy is being exported via the Internet.

I don't think, though, that this is down to evil corporate America taking the world for a ride. On the contrary - if anyone is breaching privacy codes on the Web, it's ourselves.

I was horrified the other day to discover my full name, address and private telephone number published on a public website. Then I realised - I'd put them there. It was a German database for Linux enthusiasts. I'd registered my enthusiasm, sure enough, but was a bit too enthused at the time to realise that they were going to put the whole database on the Web where others could search for it.

For a while, you could work out my mother's maiden name, and my birthday - enough, probably, to access my bank account details if you tried - from a genealogy site created by one of my relatives.

Theoretically, of course, my relative should be applying to the DPC for a licence for all those records. And that German database should have signed some complex privacy agreement with me that made it clear that they were about to cast my privacy to the winds.

But they didn't, and I didn't, and now the world knows.

This leaking of private information is only going to get worse. And, here in Silicon Valley, I do have a glimpse of how bad that can get.

It's not due to some corporate Big Brother database unfettered by sane laws, however. It's the simple progression of time and technology. Again, it's us - except that people here have been dripping online details of their activities in Silicon Valley since the start of the Net. High-tech companies, understandably, use this neighbourhood as a test case when they're trialling new services. Silicon Valley was one of the first areas in the US to get comprehensive online restaurant and nightlife reviews - even though the restaurants are largely dreadful here, and the nightlife non-existent. When www.earthviewer.com introduced their satellite imagery application (which is great fun, and available from their website if you want to try it), it was Silicon Valley that got the high-res pics taken first.

So now if you type in my local zip code, you can find out cartloads about my neighbourhood. The names and addresses of contributors to political parties, planning permission records, even high-resolution satellite pictures of my neighbourhood. I've idly uncovered tax records for my ex-landlord, the resumes of my neighbours - even the current water levels of a nearby creek.

Is this disturbing? Not usually. Could it potentially be used against me? Well, I'm not sure if the creek is a flood risk, but I do wonder what a private detective might make all of this, if someone wanted to do me harm.

Is it a product of America's curious lack of data protection? Hardly. Last week, I typed in the postcode of my parents, who live in the UK, and was faced with almost as much information. And I've been watching the search engines pick up more and more about the Irish side of my family, too, postcodes or no.

Soon, everyone will know more about their neighbours by typing their addresses into Google than the marketing companies the Data Protection Commissioner was meant to protect us from. And then what will happen? And how can the Data Protection Commissioner protect us from those timeless threats - our big mouths, and our nosey neighbours?

I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that it will have happened to Silicon Valley first. Look us up when you get there. I'll be under "CA 94087".