Your phone is 90% of the time a mini Internet tablet, not a portable version of a land-line phone.

Your phone might be. Mine isn't.

The privacy issue isn't just theoretical.

No, I agree, it's not. In fact, I'm an active campaigner for privacy in various ways, and I don't share my life with on-line social networks for privacy reasons.

However, it's easy to get into a black-and-white mindset that values only complete privacy and assumes no value at all otherwise, which I don't think is helpful. Of all the ways someone could technically spy on me if they had the resources to do it, monitoring the location of my mobile phones is unlikely to be what causes me problems.

We are in an interesting and potentially dangerous time at the moment, because it's been too long since a mass of people all suffered due to a major invasion of their privacy. It is easy to dismiss the creeping invasions we see with things like CCTV, monitoring of the Internet and telecomms services, and social networking sites asking for ever more personal information, when these aren't yet causing serious consequences to most people. And of course, people often give up that information voluntarily because it benefits them in some way that they value more than any perceived intrusion. Privacy isn't about withholding data entirely, it's about controlling who know what and how they can use that information.

I think the pendulum will swing back in a few years, though things will get worse before they start to get better. As people start to find that they really can't get jobs because of some minor indiscretion, or that their credit rating is damaged, or that they simply can't get complete health insurance because they know too many people at a high risk of some lifestyle-related condition, social norms recognising the importance of privacy and the political climate that follows will rein in the likes of Facebook and Google. All that convenience won't look quite so cost-free any more. I also don't see the kind of abuses we see by governments, for example the excessively personal searches at places like airports, continuing indefinitely. These measures are unpleasant, and no matter how much the airlines/governments stick their heads in the sand publicly, the fact is that it puts some people off flying and that costs those airlines/governments some of their profits/taxes.

At the rate things are going -- even 10 years ago, Google were the new kid on the block and Facebook didn't even exist yet -- I don't think it will take 20 years for this to happen. The abuses (and resulting concerns) are already starting, and we're already starting to see savvy politicians try to get ahead of the curve on things like blocking employers from demanding to see their employees'/applicants' private social network content. The security theatre and government intrusion is getting tiresome, and ever more expensive at a time when the global economy isn't exactly doing well.

In short, I think far more powerful social pressures than open source software are going to be what preserves useful privacy and establishes new social norms for what is and isn't acceptable behaviour in the era of the Internet and big data mining. Open source may provide a valuable tool for audit purposes and watching the watchers to keep them honest, but it's only one tool in the box.