I disagree that it is just about "trust", as someone above asserts, although that is a big part of it. Many people indeed are upset mainly about the violation o

I disagree that it is just about "trust", as someone above asserts, although that is a big part of it. Many people indeed are upset mainly about the violation of trust rather than the underlying privacy issues. (The intrusions are not advertised, explained clearly, and the amount of interconnectedness is quite beyond most people's understanding.) However, one component of all this I find distasteful is the more or less explicit coercion into revealing private information to use a service which, in some cases, is perceivedly or de facto necessary for one's livelyhood, social life or whatever. In particular because the offline equivalents or predecessors never needed such. You can argue that a teen does not need to use a virtual (no pun intended) monopoly like Facebook, or that no-one really needs to use unencrypted e-mail but that is just not realistic. The (soon-to-be) ubiquity of the WWW or internet in general means that it cannot for long be allowed to go so radically against people's privacy expectations (some countries already offer better protection than others). The solutions may well be created by the private sector - say, making HTTPS and encryption for e-mail or equivalent the defaults. Disclaimer: For this and other reasons I have avoided Facebook, MySpace et al., do not exclusively use Google's services, handle my own e-mail and so on. I am under no illusion that I am particularly secured against a concentrated effort, but I am satisfied I have limited my exposure somewhat.