How Much Do Most People Really Care About Privacy?

Josh Bernoff has a good post, focused mainly on Facebook's recent privacy PR flap, noting that most people really don't seem to care. That isn't to say that privacy isn't important, and that privacy breaches or attempts to lower levels of privacy aren't concerns -- but a factual statement that your average internet user doesn't really seem all that concerned. There have been plenty of privacy breaches over the years -- and we've even seen that as the number of breaches have grown, people seem to care less and less about them. The companies, who are making those breaches, tend to just see it as a cost of doing business and move on.

So that leads to some questions. If people really don't care, is privacy that important? Or is it a situation where people don't realize how much they should care and how much it can impact them? Or... alternatively, is it that people really do have a handle on the situations and realize that, for the most part, these privacy breaches really don't have that big of an impact (especially when they're so large scale that everyone is lumped in together). To some extent, the vastness of some of these privacy issues reminds me of David Brin's old suggestion that the world could be a better place if no one has any privacy, because that complete lack of privacy effectively lets everyone watch everyone else (so there's no asymmetry in the information) and also hides the minor issues that you want to keep private, because everyone's doing them, and so no one pays any attention.

I'm not convinced that's necessarily the case, but I am curious to see how this plays out. Even as some people have done a lot of grandstanding and get a lot of attention on privacy issues, if the majority of people really don't care, and don't see any real impact to questionable privacy practices, do we actually start to move to a world where privacy isn't seen as such an important idea?
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