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.
Fantastic point. We all want the respect of our peers. Even if this doesn't affect FB's public status, their ability to attract great people will be severely diminished.
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 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...
I saw a feature in Consumer Reports recently about Facebook privacy issues.