Privacy is Expensive.

I wish privacy was expensive, because then I could just pay for it and be done. What bothers me are services where you can't get privacy for any amount of money.

I remember when I joined Facebook, it was at least in part because it alleviated a lot of the MySpace privacy concerns. It didn't share data with outside companies, and only people with a UVA email address or who I accepted their friend request could see anything beyond my name, school, and photo. If I had known they would eventually be sharing my data such that CNN.com gets it if I just surf there or that it would publish my online shopping habits if I didn't opt-out (thankfully a rescinded policy), I'd have been more hesitant to sign up.

The real issue, at least to me, is how shady Facebook is being about the whole thing. They are trying really hard to expose people's data without the average user realizing it.

But truth be told, I've also found the average user doesn't really care once you tell them what is going on.

If Facebook allowed me to pay a subscription fee to keep my data and usage statistics private, I would do so. If I could trust them to keep that promise.

The whole thing with money is that its a way to mediate resource allocation.

As you point out, as the internet gets more ubiquitous, and there gets to be more money on the internet, it is bound to end up looking more like the "real" world.

Everything is expensive when you consider 'money left on the table.' Privacy is not any more expensive than building a service to expose that data outsiders for pay.