The war of privacy is coming
jcutrell.svbtle.com
jcutrell.svbtle.com
The common view that people are doing a simple economic trade has some problems. Namely, people don't know what their personal information is worth when they give it to Apple, Facebook, Google, or whoever. Additionally your privacy can have latent value (i.e. it may not be important to you right now, but may have value to you in the future when you don't have it): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2059154
I think perhaps it's from the opposite perspective that I'm approaching this. Specifically, creating things that require customers/users to give up privacy. The model itself stands in place of a different exchange, and while it's not clean, it does create a trade of some value.
I suppose we could argue that none of us know the value of a dollar, either, but I agree more with you than I do the devils advocate in my head.