Although the US government has taken steps to protect privacy as a right since Louis Brandeis formalized the concept in 1890, there is always a clash with commercial interests who view privacy as a commodity. What we have seen is that those who want privacy are going to have to pay a lot for it, a trend that will continue to trickle down from public figures to the general public. Gated “communities,” “identity theft protection” rackets, etc. are symptoms of the commodification of privacy.

That’s one problem with the networked world — it’s hard to know where the weak link is.

I do like the idea of using a social network to organize movement against the behavior of the network itself. One wonders how the company behind a network would react (I’m thinking of Apple removing negative threads about their computers from their discussion boards).

As for AT&T, regardless of their motivation, they’re blowing a great opportunity here. They’ve openly admitted that their network is not good enough to handle the traffic, and have claimed to be working on improving it for quite a while. But it’s becoming more evident that despite the increased profits, they’re not actually doing that, and they’d rather have their customers use their phones less. They’ve reached the point where their poor service is now a national joke. Not exactly the best way to build long term customer loyalty.

Here’s another recent example of poor customer service reaching the eyes of many more people due to our more networked world. I liked one commenter’s reading of the subtext of Delta’s response:

The line Delta left out was “and we are growing frustrated, like most companies, that every time we screw up it ends up all over the internet and turns into a big story we used to be able to hide.”

In the case of Facebook and lost privacy, I don’t think Kremers’ analogy holds because unlike a fancy car or other material possession the value of a social network is the potential number of (relevant to you) connections. A high-priced, privacy-protected social network isn’t worth much to the user if most other folks stick with the free, privacy-lacking site.

What I think is potentially interesting and sort of a synthesis of your points above is that people can use the power of Facebook to educate and spread the meme of how to change the settings and protect privacy. Credit card companies, banks, health insurers prior to HIPPA and many other businesses have trampled on our privacy for decades but often quietly. Trying to lock down your financial or health information required traversing an Orwellian system of forms and 800 numbers and so on. Maybe this is a case where the power of communication given by Facebook can trump the privacy taken away by Facebook?

On the AT&T issue, I agree that AT&T has service problems that have angered many customers but I’m not sure Fake Steve Jobs is the go-to authority for the back story. For example, AT&T’s stock price hasn’t benefited much from the reduced capex spending, so I’m not sure it’s convincing as a motivation. Over the last year while the general market as measured by the S&P 500 Index has gained 28%, AT&T’s shares are virtually unchanged. I even looked back to the last market bottom in 2003 and it looks like AT&T is trailing the market by a similar vast margin.

Second, AT&T has a mix of businesses besides cellular and the Capex numbers everyone is seeing include a lot of other stuff, such as spending on the plain old telephone network and the company’s not-very-successful, not-exactly-fiber-to-the-home project called U-Verse. You’d hope and pray as an investor that capex on those two categories would be going down quickly. I’d really like to hear from a more serious source than Fake Steve Jobs on the Capex issue.