In the digital world, privacy is the price of admission

[Commentary] Each time news flares of Facebook or other Web-based entities caught mining or manipulating user data -- 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.

"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."