Chris Jay Hoofnagle (University of California, Berkeley – School of Law, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology) has posted Post Privacy's Paternalism (Informationsfreiheit Und Informationsrecht: Jahrbuch 2011, Alexander Dix, Gregor Franssen, Michael Kloepfer, Peter Schaar, eds., Lexxion, 2012) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Executives from social networking companies have declared that we have entered a post-privacy world, where controls on personal information flow are unnecessary and even a paternalistic imposition upon human freedom. This short essay questions whether a more tolerant, permissive world has emerged with the popularity of social network services. Facebook's own authorized history describes many incidents where individuals suffered consequences from posting legal activities from their off-duty lives.
When an information-intensive company dismisses privacy law as paternalistic, maybe a form of psychological projection is in play. In recent years, we have seen Google trumpet freedom, and yet impose a real-names policy on its social network. Convinced that openness was an imperative, Facebook changed users' settings. Other sites have used technologies that make it impossible to avoid tracking. Data brokers made it possible for retailers to identify customers secretly, so customers would not "feel that you're invading their privacy."
We resent the things we recognize in ourselves. And that may explain why so many in Silicon Valley are upset about paternalism.