> I guess that the less people have any actual privacy, the more they like to
> cling to petty token bits of privacy that are afforded to them. Or rebel
> against innocuous things like Facebook, because they can't resist the real
> intrusions, like employers taking blood and DNA samples, corporations
> swapping their credit profile and governments tapping their phone and
> reading their mail.
To the extent the data on Facebook is only mined by marketers, I'll second the comments from Bill, Doug, et al. But what prevents Facebook from selling its data to companies who might then make it available to employers or insurance companies? Surely someone could come up with a way to use Facebook data to identify people who might be union sympathizers, heavy drinkers or whatever. If there's a decent slippery slope argument in this case, then people are right to be concerned about who Facebook sells its data to.
What is more interesting (and frightening) to me, though, is that Facebook can/will bring the personal and the professional realms of one's life together -- and for many people, that's a bad thing. Whereas Facebook used to be a popular website where people could comment on photos of their friends doing Jello shots, now it's an all-purpose networking tool. If you're not discriminating about who your Facebook friends are -- and many people aren't, and sometimes you just _have_ to approve people -- then news from your personal life can travel very quickly into your professional life.
A friend of mine who has applied to graduate school but hasn't told his employer got spooked the other week when a friend of his posted an innocuous message on his Facebook page asking how his applications were going. Another friend just had a prospective client who wanted to become her friend, which creates problems no matter what she does. My wife and I are hiding her pregnancy from my dad's side of the family right now because half of them are on Facebook and she doesn't want the people she works with to know. What about someone who gets a bad biopsy and s/he wants to keep it hidden from work as long as possible? And so on... Blah blah, no one is making you join, blah blah privacy options -- fine, but that doesn't mean Facebook doesn't have the potential to create serious problems. Today's concerns about "privacy" on Facebook might be misplaced, but that's better than nothing, IMO.
-WD