People aren't upset that their data is publicly shared.

They are upset because they understood that it would remain private.

Tell everyone my favorite color and I don't care.

Tell everyone I have an STD after you promised me that you wouldn't, and we've got a problem.

It's that simple.

...because clearly, those are the only choices.

As long as we're throwing around false dichotomies, I'd rather see 10 more articles about the internals of a search engine than one more rah-rah post about DDG.

I'd also argue the it's not really about geeks being upset that their own privacy is being violated. It's about other people's privacy. A huge percentage of normals don't understand the difference between a desktop app and what's inside a web browser. That ignorance can put them in very awkward if not dangerous positions. Here's why I've been part of the privacy propaganda mob on HN (without the flaming)

1. My niece and my geek friend. She's a very sweet, naive 15 year old girl who is the daughter of a conservative pastor. She loves to post pictures of her and her friends going to the beach, and camp, looking cute and goofing off. For the brief month that I tried Facebook out seriously, I had my niece posting pictures of herself in a bathing suit as well as geek friends posting comments like "MySql sucks dog cock" on my wall. Those online "friendships" needed to remain separate and in different circles of friends. And, I certainly don't want the "suck dog cock" friend ogling my niece in a bathing suit. I needed to have those relationships compartmentalized and kept private. Even had I figured out how to maintain that separation, Facebook could change that at will. I opted out, but my family still doesn't understand why.

2. My mother. She's now 74 and she bought her first laptop last year. She's on "the Facebook" because her grandkids are on Facebook. There is no way to easily explain how to maintain private/public information on Facebook. While she wants a tool to share status updates about medical conditions with friends/family, she doesn't want those broadcast to the world.

3. Rafael. I work with Rafael at my hospital. He worked in a 3rd world country as an agricultural minister before he got a visa to work in the US. After he got his green card, he packed up, moved to the US and changed careers to work in the health care field. He's been homesick so he's been catching up with old friends via Facebook. He went to a university 20 years ago with very communist leanings, and he's been talking to his friends/intellectuals about the political situation in that country. He personally knows several journalists who have been killed because of what they've written in the press about government corruption and drug cartels. He was shocked when I told him that his wall posts/conversations with his friends on Facebook were publicly searchable.

4. Alan. A former coworker of mine is a nurse, and he has issues. For a while, our hospital administration was in a tail spin about missing narcotics. Alan didn't show up for work one day, and I haven't seen him since. Another friend said that he was friends with Alan on Facebook, and several weeks prior, Alan had posted a status update on Facebook: "Vicodin, Valium and Vodka... the Holy Trinity".

I think you're right, Ed. It's about trust. But, for me it's not just that Facebook is changing their privacy policy. I, as a geek, know that anything I do online is inherently public. I use online tools with open eyes. Many Normals intuit wrongly that they are having private conversations when they interact with friends in a dark room via a laptop. That wrong belief can cause no end of problems for people.

That's why I'm on the privacy propaganda bandwagon.

Be proud of what you achieved in such a short time, not ashamed.

Also, it seems to me the problems with crap posts on the frontpage are not as old as 6 months. In fact they're so recent that I'm by no means sure that it's not just random variation. The frontpage was ok today.

What they probably can't do is ship you your stuff for $50, find the mistake a month later, and then silently charge your credit card the $500 difference. And they probably can't ask you to send the stuff back.