Drop.io’s CEO Sam Lessin presented “A Brief History of Privacy in this Data-Deluged World” at the Ignite II kick-off of Web 2.0 in NYC.

I loved Sam’s thought captured in the following quote: “For the first time in history it is now cheaper and easier for people to be public than to be private. What I mean by this is that for thousands of years publishing content about yourself was expensive and time consuming, and privacy was the default state… The web, and specifically the web 2.0 model, is turning that on its head in a very big way…. Even just a few years ago online ‘privacy’ meant little more than protecting your credit card information and identity, now it means thinking about every single thing you say, do, or write, online - and how it will be perceived, saved, and used - now and in the future.”

“In the end, privacy has been central to western civilization forever. It is something that has value. All that is changing is that something that used to come totally naturally is now something people have to both defend and actively invest in maintaining.”

To view his presentation materials, speech transcript and video online at http://drop.io/ignitesam