Voices: In the digital world, privacy is the price of admission

SAN FRANCISCO — To paraphrase the Gipper, here they go again.

But while Ronald Reagan employed that withering line to great success during a pre-election debate, there's little evidence it will have any effect on Facebook or other Web-based entities caught mining or manipulating user data.

Each time such news flares — as it did recently with the revelation that Facebook in 2012 tweaked user news feeds to gauge emotional reactions — Internet privacy activists and consumers alike react in outrage.

And each time, outrage soon gives way to business as usual.

Is it time to accept the fact that the price of living in our socially connected, high-tech age is forking over our right to do so anonymously? The glaring reality is yes.

I've long hewed to a simple belief: Free is never truly free.

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product," says Adi Kamdar, activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has monitored privacy issues from the Web's earliest days. The price of admission isn't cash but personal data.

"What we learned from the Facebook incident was simply that your online experience is highly curated from a profit-motivated point of view," says Kamdar of the social network's experiment, in which 670,000 users were fed both negative and positive posts (shocking result: the former made them sad and vice versa). "I hope it teaches people not to put all their eggs in one online basket."

Fat chance. The simple truth is that "people are captured in their social networks, and it's difficult for them to extract," says Greg McNeal, professor of law at Pepperdine University who studies the intersection of technology and public policy.

"Asking people to just get rid of their Facebook or Instagram accounts or stop searching on Google would be really hard, considering some people create accounts for their kids before they're even born," he says.

McNeal sees two paths forward: either an "acceptance of the cost of being in social networks" or a societal shift that brings greater government regulation into play.

"We'll see if the Federal Trade Commission starts to more aggressively police this kind of conduct," he says, noting that in May the FTC issued a critical report on the practices of data brokers. "You certainly won't get self-regulation from the likes of Facebook."

European lawmakers are more likely to take action when Internet privacy issues flare, as evidenced by current moves to give Continental Web users the right to be forgotten on Google. But in caveat emptor America, consumers may be on their own.

Agreeing to publication of a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, "advertising that it was treating its users like lab rats was phenomenally stupid, but it's hardly news and has been going on since the earliest days of advertising," says Paul Saffo, a longtime Silicon Valley forecaster.

So we'll just click and bear it, happily coughing up our most intimate thoughts and photos in a blatant exchange of marketing-driven data for unfettered connectivity?

Saffo offers one exception to that steady state.

"We're going to care some day," he says. "But not until the consequences shift from your preferences and likes being mined to negative repercussions to your job, your credit history, your health care, your life. That crisis may come. But until then, it shouldn't be news to anyone that if you're online, you're being manipulated."

Della Cava covers technology and culture for USA TODAY out of San Francisco.