One of the interesting consequences of the news feed is that users can now see how many of their friends have joined the protest against it. It's helping to snowball the backlash it has generated. In any case, it will be interesting to see how quickly users habituate themselves to this change, assuming facebook stands its ground. Remember the initial reaction to the gmail advertising scheme (scan messages to customize ad content)? As I recall Google backed off this briefly, but not for long -- and now people seem to hardly notice. As for the status of privacy expectations -- I was a journalist back when database reporting was going mainstream. We were fascinated by how easy it was (at the time) to go to whichever government agency caught our attention and ask them to dump all their public record data onto disks which we could then sort through using spreadsheet and database programs. In theory all of these records had long been public; in practice going through them looking for correlations would have been prohibitively time consuming and labor intensive without digital files. There is an important difference between theory and practice in cases like this -- and people are generally smart enough, I think, to understand that difference. Yes, in theory, all the information that one posted about oneself on Facebook could be meticulously sorted through, time stamped, and archived by someone paying VERY close attention to your page -- and the pages of scores of other "friends." In practice, doing this would be prohibitively time consuming and labor intensive. Facebook has just closed the gap between theory (all information is publicly available) and reality (actually gathering all this info would require monitoring everyone's facebook page 24 hours a day) -- and it seems important not to overlook the fact that this does represent a significant change (to insist that it doesn't is to insist that people don't understand the difference between theory and practice (because ideally, perhaps, there shouldn't be one) -- a pathology that seems endemic to the academy). Having said that, there's something interesting about those moments when we're forced to face the fact that the privacy we act like we think we have is (even in practice) becoming increasingly illusory. I'd speculate that many people still treat search engines as if the information they enter is private. AOL and the New York Times (among other outlets) recently drove home the point that it is only private in the sense that it has become the property of the search engines themselves (who can, at will, disclose it publicly, or to state authorities). Finally, as to expectations of privacy -- although there is no constitutional right to privacy, there are certainly elements of privacy built into the constitution (fourth amendment) and more than a century's worth of reliance on the notion of a common law privacy right. The right to privacy plays an important role in key judicial decisions with very important consequences. We do have a Privacy Act, after all, and the president is supposed to get permission before wiretapping us. I don't think the common sense version of privacy was derived entirely from thin air. I'm plenty willing to critique the notion of privacy, but let's not cave too quickly -- we might be providing a bit too much assistance to those only too willing to agree.