While all the above points are true, there is a big difference between picking up the phone to call someone in 1950 and posting an update on a social networking

While all the above points are true, there is a big difference between picking up the phone to call someone in 1950 and posting an update on a social networking site in 2011. I would submit that there are two factors that make the difference: 1) laws regulating the service in question and 2) ease of data aggregation / mining. In both cases there are barriers to interception & analysis of communication that effectively provide or used to provide a certain level of expected privacy and anonymity. Of course no communication is 100% secure and of course anything can be intercepted, but how hard is that to do? In 1950 if you wanted to get pictures of someone's house, learn the names of their known associates, find out what books they own, what magazines they read, what opinions they have, their work history, their goals, their aspirations, which of their relatives they are closest to, etc. etc. -- your work would have been cut out for you. It would involve physical trips to places like courthouses, time and effort in taking pictures, developing film, driving around, possibly snooping where you shouldn't, asking lots of people lots of questions, and so on. Now all that is out there with a few mouse clicks and not only is that the case, it is rapidly becoming the social norm that it should be out there and if it isn't, as Mr. Schmidt says, then you must have something to hide. The genie of cheap, accessible, centralized data storage and data mining is out of the bottle. At least with email there is some sort of legal precedent to treat communications as privileged. With social networks and the like, users give up their rights to the commercial entity that provides the service. And as others have pointed out, rolling your own services is not an attractive alternative. Agreed, the network layer can be intercepted, but the network layer either has to be hacked into or somebody in law enforcement has to leave a data trail regarding the interception. At the service layer, it is becoming assumed that you give up all rights to your data, and this is something whose repercussions have yet to be fully felt.