Here's the take-home:
If it weren't for my inner cynic, I'd be wondering, "What year is it? Y'mean that a decade and a half into the Internet Age, we're still discussing this???"This may be fine -- the advantages might very well outweigh the risks -- but users often can't weigh the trade-offs because these companies are going out of their way to hide the risks.
Of course, companies don't want people to make informed decisions about where to leave their personal data. RealAge wouldn't get 27 million members if its webpage clearly stated "This information will be sold to pharmaceutical companies," and Google Docs wouldn't get five million users if its webpage said "We'll take some steps to protect your privacy, but you can't blame us if something goes wrong."
Time and again, you hear the platitude that democracy cannot exist without an educated, informed public. By the same principle, neither can Adam Smith-style capitalism (not the collection of oligopolies that masquerade as such). As the recent scandals with tainted consumer products, children's toys, etc. have shown, truth in labeling can be a life-or-death situation. Not to mention that an entire industry can lose millions, if not more when consumers are spooked en masse.
That being said, you cannot always trust people to make decisions that are emotion-free, even when all the facts are at hand. Which is why I think that the sleazier online operators are getting off more lightly than they should (assuming they can be brought to justice). Why? Because most people don't look at information and hard goods as being in the same category of "property." Yet stealing and misusing information is still stealing and misusing someone's property. Just because information is intangible doesn't mean that the damage isn't. But that may be lost on some, if not most. Maybe we should start calling it "data-jacking" to get the point across.
From a customer service standpoint, that bias combined with the lack of accountability scares me. Frankly, every time I hear the software gurus go all hand-wavy about pushing our flagship applications--meaning our bread and butter--into a "cloud" platform, I fight the urge to both roll my eyes and cringe. If my client's data is stolen or vandalized, it'll be a lot harder to figure it out, much less fix, when it's somewhere in "the cloud," rather than twenty feet away from where I sit.
The irony of course is that with all the meddling that governments worldwide have done with the internet--from blocking to mining--the bureaucrats haven't put a whole lot of thought or resources, much less planet-wide regulatory policy-making into making it a safer place to do business. At least not the legitimate kind.
