It started late last year, when to make more of your profile information accessible to Google and other Facebook users. You could of course change those settings, but most people didn't. That earned Facebook a class-action suit and ongoing scrutiny by the FTC.

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Then Google introduced . That emerged from the womb with two left feet, both of which it immediately thrust into its own mouth. The biggest problem? Buzz that Gmailers had assumed was private. Google has been eating crow by the family-sized bucket -- and tweaking Buzz to make it more respectful of personal privacy -- ever since.

Last week to have math geeks tweak its recommendations engine after the "anonymous" data used by researchers in the first contest proved not quite as anonymous as Netflix thought. A pair of University of Texas researchers by cross-checking their movie preferences with other publicly available information.

At South by Southwest last Friday, Microsoft social media researcher Danah Boyd gave a keynote detailing how privacy has been eroded, largely because the people who build services like Google Buzz and Facebook (aka, "") don't understand the differences between privacy online and how it works in the real world.