Back then, the proponents of that plan insisted the privacy concern was largely academic. I somewhat wonder what would've happened post-PRISM leak had they ever implemented it.
Expecting privacy-minded people to opt-out of using telephones or emails for fear of government monitoring isn't reasonable. Opting out of Stack Overflow is nowhere in the same league.
I feel like I explained the issue pretty clearly in the preceding sentence:
> Back then, the proponents of that plan insisted the privacy concern was largely academic.
We now know via the various leaks that have occurred recently, that government agencies will use any information available to them and that there is largely nothing the public can do to stop it or be made aware of it except through the occasional one-off leak like PRISM.
That is to say, the privacy concerns related to any private company tracking PII to this degree aren't academic or abstract. Information kept to prevent abuse can just as easily be repurposed for surveillance. I suspect (and would hope) many of the same people pushing for this feature back in 2011 would reconsider their support for a feature like this knowing what we know now.
> Expecting privacy-minded people to opt-out of using telephones or emails for fear of government monitoring isn't reasonable.
I'm not sure what part of my comment lead you to believe I would think otherwise, but I don't.
> Opting out of Stack Overflow is nowhere in the same league.
In the comments of the post I linked, several people were insisting that there wouldn't need to be an additional disclosure because it's information that's either public, available to other third parties (like browser makers), or already available to Stack Overflow in a different form. Not knowing that a site like a hypothetical Stack Overflow—where a feature like this was implemented—is keeping records on this level and therefore not opting out isn't informed choice.
Indeed, a significant portion of the outcry with respect to the NSA leaks is that nobody knew that the government had such a direct connection to the information stored by private companies that people could've easily opted out of using (e.g., Facebook, Apple, Google, or Paltalk).
But all I was attempting to do here was mention a past experience with Panopticlick and muse how it might've went today. I guess I've been bitten by something pg once said[1], that "you can't be concise on forums because if you leave any possible room for misinterpretation, someone will reply with it".
[1]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/113394/implement-som...