Robert Kuttner rightly worries about personal data aggregation by the likes of Google. It wouldn't be hard, he notes, for an overzealous official using the Patriot Act to get into personal data that often we didn't know was being collected.

But he misses the mark in his proposed solution: the marketplace. People doing nothing wrong won't pay for privacy and those who are really worried about someone snooping, don't have the numbers to make a difference on the scales necessary to force a Google to adopt change.

Extremely powerful encryption in programs like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) has been available for years. Many people predicted that it would be commonly used and integrated into our computers by now, negating most privacy concerns.

But there was a small cost that the average person refused to pay. It wasn't a monetary cost -- the program is free! -- but cost in time and effort. Users have to change their habits to organize work around using encryption. More critically, they have to remember and manage passwords and keys. Despite the potential gain and free availability, it just wasn't worth that small effort for the majority of people to adopt PGP.

The lesson, unfortunately, is that even though most people want and expect privacy, in general they won't pay (in either money or effort) to guarantee that they get it.