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.

RE: orders of magnitude