Maciej Ceglowski:

Surveillance as a business model is the only thing that makes a site like Facebook possible.

This idea has gotten a lot of currency recently. I think its embraced by both extremes of the "big data" debate - the privacy advocates as well as the spies. Anne Neuberger's "Withering Nation" scenario supposes that "privacy obsession hampers commercial activity" - they literally think that if the privacy advocates win, it will lead to national decline!

I'm wondering what your view of these ideas is, but I think its hyperbole. As DuckDuckGo has demonstrated, I know enough based on the search term you entered to show you a relevant ad. The value add associated with surveillance may literally not be worth the privacy impact. I have the same question about Facebook - do they really need to monitor what I'm posting to Facebook, or can they make enough money through traditional Internet advertising (which is also admittedly invasive, but not to the same extent.)?

The question of economically maximal privacy invasion will be an ongoing dialog for some time I think. I have a hard time buying the idea that nothing that is going on is sustainable unless the privacy incursions remain as intrusive as they currently are, nor do I believe that a more privacy respectful internet will lead to the decline of the United States. I believe that these perspectives overvalue surveillance and undervalue privacy, because the economic benefits are privacy do not directly accrue to certain people. They are, nonetheless, real.

Am I wrong?

Decius wrote:
The question of economically maximal privacy invasion will be an ongoing dialog for some time I think.

As an addendum, two observations:

1. Google was able to offer unlimited email storage to the market in exchange for a deeper privacy invasion, and gmail has been extremely successful. This is a big mark in favor of the idea the more privacy invasion enables new services. However, email is increasingly irrelevant in the age of social networking software, and for some reason services like dropbox continue to be successful despite the fact that Google makes it easy to move large files around.

2. Facebook is really all about privacy. The reason they beat myspace is because myspace was too riddled with spam, so people were compelled to move. Thats also the reason that email is less relevant than it used to be, for interactions that aren't commercial in nature. Facebook has been very sensitive to privacy, providing controls that limit who can access your content, while, at the same time, trying to do as much as possible and pushing the limits.

The bottom line is that Facebook really has wrestled with drawing this line in the right place, and it isn't maximal exposure or intrusiveness, as they've found.