I just want to say "fuck everything", hold up my hands and walk away.
Here's the really insidious thing about the whole situation, and something that I don't think has gotten enough airtime:<p>We are all at the mercy of the people in our social graphs who don't keep things secret. <i>I</i> might stay off of Facebook, encrypt all my email, and avoid using smart phones, but anybody I'm in contact with who <i>doesn't</i> is being continually mined. Shadow profiles of me are showing up on services I'd never use willingly because my friend shared their address book with Facebook.<p>We really only have three groups to hold responsible: ourselves (for developing these technologies), our government (for using these technologies to oppress us), and every other citizen (for voting the government into power and playing along when we ask to mine their data).<p>The core issue we're seeing is that it is no longer really possible to ignore the fact that most consumers are liabilities to our privacy, and that they'll gladly sell out their fellow man for the dullest of shiny trinkets.<p>Honestly, the most insidious part of all this isn't our loss of privacy or our trust in some beneficial Big Brother: it's the distressing fact that we can't trust anyone else anymore, and that we've shown that democracy is impossible with such an unworthy populace.<p>Make no mistake--<i>that's</i> the real tragedy here.