And indeed, “in that sense, everybody has something to hide.”

If you have to submit personal information such as birthday, phone number, etc. to an online business my advice would be to think about whether you really need to submit that information in order to complete the transaction. Why I usually do with that kind of information is that I submit “fake” data in cases where I know the information is not needed (or need not to be true) to submit my order.

how do you interpret “something to hide”? Does that refer only to those who have sinister intentions, or does it refer to anyone who wants to keep certain data private?

I am convinced that this differentiation makes a lot of sense for propaganda purposes — “I don’t have a problem with the PATRIOT act, because I have nothing to hide!” –, but if you take civil liberties seriously, privacy also means that it is nobody’s business why someone wants to keep certain things private.

In that sense, everybody has something to hide, and if you take Ron’s statement at face value in this context, you would not be able to do business with any online company anymore.

Obviously, data leaks and privacy breaches are real threats, and yet we assume that companies like banks, airlines, hotels, etc. at least try to keep our data safe. Otherwise we would, indeed, not be willing to share data like our addresses, credit card numbers, etc. with such businesses. This applies to both online and offline business transactions, though: if you cannot entrust anyone with this kind of data, you would not even be able to purchase a plane ticket from a brick-and-mortar travel agent’s either.

In the specific case of Buzz, however, the people in charge decided to deliberately publicize personal data like email address lists. And that is why I no longer trust Google, even though I see no reason to cut my data ties with other online business.

As you’re probably well aware, you can’t even generally trust “trustworthy” companies your sensitive data, since they sometimes leak such data due to technical incompetence (read: “they f*ck up”).

So, I do agree with Ron’s statement: “If you have something to hide, maybe you should think twice about using the internet to conduct your business.”

I wholeheartily agree with your comment on Eric Schmidt’s quote, tho. His statement simply is ridiculous — but what else do you expect from the world’s largest “data craken?!”