Maybe you missed that particular angle. But to my mind it's one worrisome symptom of a problem that's about to get a whole lot worse: database privacy violations.

Take another example: While not a data breach, the names, addresses and locations of donors supporting the passage of California's Proposition 8 bill were posted on the Web, enabling opponents to send death threats.

Then there's privacy policy: all information -- including searches, online applications and e-mail sent to gmail accounts -- is routinely data-mined.

Now there's a school of thought that says that if you're dong nothing wrong, you shouldn't care about privacy. As then- CEO Scott McNealy is reported to have said in 1999, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."

And you can argue that because steroid use is illegal, the political donations of over a certain amount are public information, and Google use is strictly voluntary, neither A-Rod nor the anti-8 donors nor Google users have anything to complain about.