While you are right that the arguments are pre-existing, I think emotionally there is a discrete change with the IPO. It is one thing to feel like you are surrendering your privacy in order to stay in touch with your friends; it is not entirely another thing to surrender your privacy for the geeks providing the platform to make money to support and extend the platform.
Surrendering your privacy so that an institutional shareholder can make money is, emotionally, a different proposition and this is what the OP demonstrates. It's not that people didn't willingly surrender privacy before the Internet; but then, like now, it was done in a two-way transaction. The classic example is building intimacy with, say, your spouse, by telling them something that nobody else knows.
It is entirely possible that with Facebook a public company, some people (who were previously content) will re-evaluate whether they like the other side of the transaction.
Surrendering your privacy so that an institutional shareholder can make money is, emotionally, a different proposition and this is what the OP demonstrates. It's not that people didn't willingly surrender privacy before the Internet; but then, like now, it was done in a two-way transaction. The classic example is building intimacy with, say, your spouse, by telling them something that nobody else knows.
It is entirely possible that with Facebook a public company, some people (who were previously content) will re-evaluate whether they like the other side of the transaction.