on privacy and facebook

there's much debate about the privacy issues with facebook. i think as long as people have a choice about how exposed they want to be, everything should be fine. the popularity of facebook shows that it does provide value to the users, and it's legitimate for them to ask for something back. nothing comes for free, otherwise how are they going to survive and how the facebook employees going to earn their lives? so we need to trade something for the service facebook provides. this is how the world works: trading governed by the law of comparative advantage. we have our own strength in doing certain things, but not everything.  in this case, facebook has the social utility service that has value, and the users have their personal information that also have value, and they trade these two things.

edward benson in his blog post mentioned two alternatives for facebook users.
1) facebook asks for a fee for using its service, but doesn't sell the user information to third parties. this could work. with such a large user base (more than 400 million active users), even a small fee can make the company very profitable and the fee can  be insignificant to the users too. maybe we are too used to the free service paradigm for internet services that we forgot about this option. if people think it's worth the price, they would pay, unless they think their personal information doesn't worth the fee. if this is the case, then there shouldn't be such privacy issues. people may have different opinions about their privacy. maybe there can be 2 options. for those who don't want to have their information shared to third parties, pay a subscription fee.

2) if our personal information and web browsing information  is valuable, why don't we directly sell it to the third party? i think this goes back to the point of law of comparative advantage. not everyone has the technical expert to build web tools to do so. if we try to do everything ourselves, we go back to the primitive society with self-sustainability. the law of comparative advantage says if parties produce good or service that they can do with higher efficiency and trade for other good or service, there is a net benefit for all the parties.