Interesting choice of words, here’s a link which puts it in plainer language.

http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/fuck-you-google/

Your comment,

“… it’s fundamentally playing with people’s perceptions of public and private online spaces and actively changing social norms …”

A similar cause has been seen with mobile phones “Short Message Service” (SMS) and “Multimedia Messaging Service” (MMS).

Basicaly if you send a SMS to multiple recipients it works like sending out an EMail to a “Blind Carbon Copy” or “BCC list”, that is each recipient only gets to see the originator and just their details in the headers (or should do if the original MTA is working correctly .

However when sending an MMS to a list it is like sending an EMail to a “To list”, that is each recipient only gets to see the originator and ALL recipient details in the headers.

With MMS (on T-Mobile) you get a list of all the phone numbers the MMS has been sent to…

I reported this issue to T-Mobile when they did their recipient side software and indicated to them it was a privacy issue…

The result no change so far….

The upshot is that unless a large number of people complain the organisation concerned will not do anything…

Thus some people change habits or in many cases don’t use the part of a service or in some cases stop using the service compleatly.

The service provider either does not see the level of service uptake initial figures suggest or it gets flamed or both. In which case the service provider might well drop the service rather than fix it. It depends on their business incentives.

And as you note.

“As a business decision, this makes sense, …”

And

“… people [do] react when their privacy expectations are suddenly shifted by the machinations of Silicon Valley.”

Though you refrain from saying,

Often not in the businesses best interests.