I have to imagine that there is going to be a day of reckoning sometime in the future for a lot of the people who share their information t0o freely. I think that it is going to take a long time for the population to become educated in keeping with the pace of technology. There has been a paradigm shift where everything is going social. Social networks have taken over the planet. Now our search engines are social and datamining us. That stupid little game you download on your phone to distract yourself for 20 mins? Social. Every tech company has or is waking up to the fact that their users are products whose demographic information can be monetized for personal gain. So you get shit like a crappy 'hangman' program on your phone data mining you. And the big players like Facebook are crafting their products to have you share everything by default, and make it difficult to figure out how not to. So you get apps like 'Girls around me', and you get scandals where apps like Path rip your contacts out of your phone and copy them to their database without your consent.

I think that people are sharing WAY too much information, but I don't fault them terribly much. They are being taken advantage of imo, left and right, by companies looking to make a buck. They are being lied to by omission, or explicitly, and the privacy statements of a lot of these companies are designed to obscure exactly what they collect about you. I think most people would be freaked out to know that Google can spit out a data sheet that has your name, residence, personality profile based on web surfing habits, along with the history of all the places you have ever been online, as well as the exact physical locations you have been, and probably are now. They don't think about it when they surf the web or use a map.

The sad reality is that there are no options. The internet is fairly essential to modern life. Social networks are as real as physical networks. Cutting yourself off in the name of privacy simply isn't realistic because there are no services (or collection of them rather) that do entirely what you need them to do without scraping your info and selling/utilizing it for monetary gain.