Of course. But that's the GPs whole point, he can't be providing info, either to confirm or to deny so it is relatively moot. We can choose to believe him because he's a HN'er of long and good standing (which I am inclined to do) or not (because there is no way to prove it and he does work for the company mentioned and that is not always the best source of information for things like this).

I'm quite sure he speaks the truth in an absolute sense. Maybe 50,000 or 100,000 people have canceled, maybe even only 10,000. But that was how every other social network that preceded facebook died off, by the first relatively large group of users that said 'enough'. What goes up quickly can go down just as fast, if any social network that is perceived as 'more secure' and 'less evil' in combination with 'nice to the users' gains traction with those leaving now then this could very well follow the exact same graph that caused FB to grow so fast.

This is not a 'sure thing' by any means, though probably the effect will be limited. Once it starts feeding back on itself or if facebook has one or two more security booboos all bets are off.

Those small pebbles and chunks of ice sliding down the mountain could be normal erosion or the first signs of an impending avalanche. Facebook is firmly in the "evil" category for many outspoken techies (e.g. those people every Facebook employee runs into at parties who no longer think they are working for a cool company but who instead mention how they are now working for Sauron) and even among the general populace the company is widely considered to be bit creepy. If things continue the current trajectory I think a serious backlash and government regulation is not out of the question.

The NYT thinks people who read the NYT care about it. My opinion last week was firmly in your camp on the general population. Now I'm not so sure.

I saw a feature in Consumer Reports recently about Facebook privacy issues.

I don't know if you are informed how facebook overtook the marked leader in Germany, StudiVZ: StudiVZ got a lot of bad press for privacy violations that were pretty harmless compared to what Facebook is doing now. Subsequently, a significant share of their customers left towards Facebook. Sweet irony...