I'm not sure which is worse: the real privacy issues or the paranoia about the privacy issues.

The real privacy issues are.

Take yourself back fifteen years and imagine people predicting that just
going on the web would be a privacy concern, and that visiting a doctor
would be a privacy issue... you'd probably be laughed at as a tin hat.
But even something as innocuous as small text files (cookies) have
become mighty powerful invasions. Viruses were all but unknown fifteen
years ago, and anybody who predicted that opening an Email could be
dangerous was roundly thumped. Now we have companies like SONY actively
putting trojan horses and rootkits in their own mass market items that
monitor your file transfers and decide whether or not you should be
permitted to accomplish them, and Amazon giving out "personalized
prices" (guess where that comes from) when you visit them. When
journalism is under the entertainment division, it's not too hard to
imagine articles being written in such a way that they read differently
depending on who accesses the web site, and what their browsing history is.

It's not paranoia. It's real.

That is not to say that there is a man behind the curtain pulling all
the levers. However, having the machine pull the levers by itself is an
even bigger problem.

Jose
--
The monkey turns the crank and thinks he's making the music.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.