Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess. Some people cite backroom lobbying by people from places with authoritarian factions, e.g. Reddit and SA, but I don't have the resources to verify the rumors.
(Whether that is a good idea is another matter. Also, I still don't like Facebook.)
"Don't Take it Perosnally Babe, it Just Ain't Your Story."
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The driving motivation for the story is that this generation _raised_ on "4chan" and "Facebook" shares deep and intimate things with each other _knowing full well_ that what they're sharing may be under review.
Towards the end it implies that privacy is an antiquated concept; and yet that changes surprisingly little.
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I'm with you; whether it is a good idea or not, I can't say. I'll just wait until it manifests in culture.
That being said: I don't like the implications of getting rid of privacy. Not when society likes to latch on to the most unimportant of biases when making incredibly important decisions. (For e.g: getting turned down for a job offer because of some political, philosophical, or religious rant on your Facebook wall.)
If you're going to hold such things over my head; then I'd rather not share them with you. -- And that (to me) is the essence of privacy.
It's why I like Google+ and Diaspora so much. I think the concept of "Circles" or "Aspects" gives the user a lot of flexibility when it comes to managing their own personal idea of privacy.
It's incredibly common for people to grow up afraid to say many things, having massive restrictions on some parts of their personalities due to those kinds of pressures.
We see it most obviously with the single big things such as "I can't tell my religious family I'm an atheist" or "I got ostracised for dating someone from another culture" or whatever, but it's almost certainly going on for a huge range of smaller personality facets - or ones which were blanked out before they developed.
Who would you be if you'd never had any restrictions on what you could say other than moral ones? If any interest you had, you would have been supported in following up, any comment you made would have been taken seriously and never laughed at, any attempt to better yourself was encouraged not mocked.
Maybe more and more surveillance such as you imagine will actually make it more obvious that others opinions are their largely their own problem and don't affect you all that much, and you should develop more confidence sooner.
(Yet, that only applies if you assume the oversight is only for spotting criminals and the guides for criminal activity exactly agree with your own, and the system is fair).
Is nobody familiar with the privacy settings? Facebook has lists, G+ has circles. One for family, one for acquaintances, one for close friends, one for business. Guess who gets to see the pictures from the house party and who doesn't?
Google gets to see all of them. The proper way to compartmentalize is to actually compartmentalize.
I'm not, and neither are you unless you work there. They routinely add new settings with recklessly chosen defaults; there's no way to be confident about may be publicized while we aren't looking.
Either this makes me lucky enough that I should consider playing the lottery, or these concerns are overstated.