I have written about privacy on this blog several times before.  This week the topic seems to be front and center again with Eric Schmidt stating in a CNBC interview that “[i]f you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” and Facebook introducing new privacy settings, which default to sharing with everyone.

I love how this topic keeps coming around and believe it will continue to do so for a long time.  The reason is that the personal expectations and social norms around privacy will take at least one if not two generations to adapt to the dramatically changed technological capabilities.  In the meantime, it certainly will help to keep educating people about how the net and services like Google actually work, e.g. here is how “suggest” works in the Google Chrome address bar: “When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for” (from the Chrome privacy policy).