Miguel Feliciano

In 2004 everyone freaked out when Gmail launched because Google would be reading your emails to figure out what ads to serve you. “Privacy advocates objected to the advertising model, which involves Google’s robot eyes scanning every e-mail for keywords and displaying contextual advertisements alongside a user’s inbox,” noted Wired

.

That might sound familiar to your great-great-great grandparents. Supposedly many people were apprehensive about using telephones in the early 1900s because they knew the phone companies could listen in on their phone calls. There are people who won’t use phones today because of the ease in which calls can be tapped.

But the rest of us seem to be ok with Gmail. And our phone. That’s because the benefits of those products far outweigh the privacy costs. And people are going to be just fine with Facebook, too. Even if they did do a switcharoo on privacy settings a month ago that is still reverberating

through the tech press.

Contrary to published reports

, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did not say “the age of privacy is over” in my interview with him last Friday evening at the Crunchies. You can watch the video here

for yourself. What he said is that he wants Facebook to change with its users, and keep its product fresh. Which is exactly what they are doing.

The fact is that privacy is already really, really dead. Howard Lindzon nailed it

the other day when he said “Equifax, Transunion, Capital One, American Express and their cousins raped our privacy,” Everything we do, everything we buy, everywhere we go is tracked and sitting in a database somewhere. Our location via our phone, or our car GPS. Our credit card transactions. Everything. Honestly, a picture of you taking a bong hit in college is mice nuts compared to the mountain of data that is gathered and exploited about every single one of us every single day. You just don’t really see that other stuff because those companies don’t like to talk about the data their gathering. I don’t see an Equifax blog post outlining exactly how they are gathering and selling your information, for example.

The point is that we like Facebook. Very, very few of us are going to stop using it. It was inevitable that they’d rip the bandaid off and try to get their users to make data public. It’s what’s best for Facebook. And if users hate it enough, someone else will launch a competing service that has different policies and thrive. You can guess what the odds of that happening are.

I spoke to Blippy

CEO Philip Kaplan

earlier tonight. Blippy is a service that lets users publish everything they buy with their credit cards.

Crazy right? Who’d want to do that? Well, apparently a lot do. The company has let in 2,500 people so far. Those 2,500 people are publishing $200,000 worth of purchases a day to their friends. It’s less than a month old and they’ve tracked $3.8 million in transactions already, with an average transaction size of $46.

And more than 10,000 people are on the waiting list to get an account and gladly share their consumption behavior with the world.

Why are they doing it? To share what they’re buying, and talk about it. Or to let advertisers see what they like and tailor offers to them. Or something. The point is, we don’t really care about privacy anymore. And Facebook is just giving us exactly what we want.

get widgetminimize

CrunchBase Information

Facebook

Website:	facebook.com
Location:	Palo Alto, California, United States
Founded:	February 1, 2004
Funding:	$716M

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 350 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

This is in no way a suprise. As more and more people sign up for social networking accounts and share certain information with their friends and those that follow them on sites like Twitter, we should not feel violated that probably a great majority of these friends are complete strangers to us and they have access to our private lives.

Many people, myself included, will accept a friend request or reciprocate a follow on people we might see in social groups we belong to, but that we do not communicate with. So why are people getting upset when a site like Facebook switches their privacy settings or a new innovative site like Blippy offers a way to share your purchase history.

We are all intrigued by what our friends are doing, and want to know if that new DMB (Dave Matthews Band) CD is worth the purchase, and we like to share our experiences with our friends and those new friends that are interested in us.

Thanks Philip Kaplan for Blippy; though I haven't signed up for it, it gave me a new idea for a business.