Personalization comes at a price...and that price is our privacy. There are degrees of privacy. Gmail can look through all of my mail and stat to figure out

Personalization comes at a price...and that price is our privacy. There are degrees of privacy. Gmail can look through all of my mail and stat to figure out what's important and what's not for me. Technically Google can read all my mail, but the presumption is they do not, and need not (aside from programmatic parsing) in order to provide personalization. Even if I give up some degree of privacy to Google via Gmail that should not mean I'm giving up the privacy of my E-mail to the whole world. My mail should still be effectively private. My problem with sites like Facebook is that they begin with some assurances abut privacy and limited access, get people to enter personal info, then gradually change the ground rules. And they're not doing it to offer personalization for the benefit of users, they're doing it for the benefit of their customers, the advertisers.