"My friends and I have a fantasy football league running through Yahoo. Yahoo could have backdoors from the NSA! I could be putting my entire online identity at

"My friends and I have a fantasy football league running through Yahoo. Yahoo could have backdoors from the NSA! I could be putting my entire online identity at risk by participating in fantasy football." I would say that the reasonableness of that discussion would depend on the sort of otherwise private information your participation in fantasy football compromises. Does this fantasy football program encourage you to install a phone application that requires far more permissions then a fantasy football program has any business requiring? Then perhaps a discussion about privacy is warranted (I mean, assuming we were discussing Yahoo's fantasy football program in the first place). Does this fantasy football program just let you use a psuedo-anonymous handle and doesn't ask you for anything personal anyway? Then the discussion is probably a distraction. Smartphones have a unique/unprecedented amount of access to our personal lives. Discussions about smartphones and privacy should be considered natural because of the properties that smartphones have. If other things share similar properties, they'll get that discussion too. (As a non-smartphone example, I recall some discussion about privacy and the Xbox One and its (at the time) 'required' kinect sensor.)