Whistleblowers do us all a service. But one Whistleblower company by the name of Cryptome took on the wrong powerful corporate entity when it spilled a lot of sensitive information about that entity. In fact, the backlash for their meddling was they were banned from the internet. Now who in this world is powerful enough to ban someone from the internet? It isn’t the American, Chinese or Russian governments. It isn’t even the IRS. Only one entity is that powerful. That entity is Microsoft.

So what crime was so hideous that Microsoft kicked Cryptome out of cyberspace entirely? Well they dared to reveal to the world something we all had suspected in our deepest and most paranoid minds. They revealed the scope and the depth of Microsoft’s ability to gather your personal information and store it for longs periods of time – maybe forever.

The document that Cryptome disclosed to the world was called the "Microsoft Online Services Global Criminal Compliance Handbook". This phenomenal document is not fiction. It is very real and it discloses in painful detail how Microsoft systematically uses the data their users put into some of Microsoft’s most popular applications. If you ever had a sinking feeling you should not be volunteering so much information to a huge corporate monster like Microsoft, this "spy guide" will confirm that you were right all along.

The applications that Microsoft uses to collect private data from their users are ones that a lot of people enjoy. They include Microsoft Office Live, MSN, Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger among others. Since some of these services have members in the hundreds of thousands, that represents a very large database of user information that could be used for good or for evil.

This kind of disclosure can add a lot of fuel to the fire of conspiracy theory folks who see efforts to spy on the people by the government behind every tree stump. The good news, if there is any, that came out of this shocking revelation about Microsoft retaining all of your private information is that they did not "seem" to be doing it for any evil purpose. In fact, one of the good things Microsoft says they wanted the data for was to provide their users with the ability to recover their data if they lose it in a computer crash.

Whether you believe that or not, this revelation shows that the information is being collected and there isn’t anything we can do about it. We can only hope that Microsoft is playing fair with this data or that someone somewhere will make them play fair with it. But just knowing that they can and do collect it should be a huge warning sign to all of us to be careful what we put online because it may stay there forever.