"We're essentially telling people who have very legitimate reasons for wanting to protect their privacy that their other option is to become a Luddite hermit. I

"We're essentially telling people who have very legitimate reasons for wanting to protect their privacy that their other option is to become a Luddite hermit. Is that really the best we can do?" Not exactly. We're telling people that they're not going to have privacy, period. We're assuming that privacy is dead. You might think it's still something that can be salvaged, but lots of people assume that the world is moving to less privacy whatever we do. Which is why we should be education people from the start that, whether we like it or not, anything they type into a computer is basically public. I especially like Scoble's thoughts on this. He says, rightly I believe, that anything that is a copy-paste away from becoming public, isn't really private at all. He also had the fun adventure of having many private emails being made public as part of lawsuits against Microsoft. Also, you might want to read about The Transparent Society: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society.