Pri­vacy could become a com­pet­i­tive fea­ture of social net­work­ing sites, sug­gests Bruce Schneier in an arti­cle that looks at the inter­est­ing topic of pri­vacy salience: the sug­ges­tion that pri­vacy reas­sur­ances make peo­ple more, not less, con­cerned.

Pri­vacy salience does a lot to explain social net­work­ing sites and their atti­tudes towards pri­vacy. From a busi­ness per­spec­tive, social net­work­ing sites don’t want their mem­bers to exer­cise their pri­vacy rights very much. They want mem­bers to be com­fort­able dis­clos­ing a lot of data about themselves.

[…] Users care about pri­vacy, but don’t really think about it day to day. The social net­work­ing sites don’t want to remind users about pri­vacy, even if they talk about it pos­i­tively, because any reminder will result in users remem­ber­ing their pri­vacy fears and becom­ing more cau­tious about shar­ing per­sonal data. But the sites also need to reas­sure those “pri­vacy fun­da­men­tal­ists” for whom pri­vacy is always salient, so they have very strong pro-privacy rhetoric for those who take the time to search them out. The two dif­fer­ent mar­ket­ing mes­sages are for two dif­fer­ent audiences.