Fascinating post on MSNBC about the price users put on Privacy…The post talks about experiments where users were asked how much they value their private data. Customers were asked the question in two ways:

• How much are customer willing to pay to protect their privacy?
• How much do customers want to be paid to share their private information?

As expected customers wanted a whole lot more money to share their private information while very few were willing to pay to anything to protect that information. I think people have this assumption about privacy that its something they just have…and I think its an artifact of how things used to be before everything changed because of technology. We now need to reexamine our assumptions about how much we really value privacy and come up with a more rational value (rather then have endowment effect and other psychological factors skew our judgement) … This is too important for everybody.