Whether it's Facebook or Google or the other companies, that basic principle that users should be able to see and control information about them that they themselves have revealed to the companies is not baked into how the companies work. But it's bigger than privacy. Privacy is about what you're willing to reveal about yourself.

We really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.

To be a good citizen, it's important to be able to put yourself in other people's shoes and see the big picture. If everything you see is rooted in your own identity, that becomes difficult or impossible.

In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues are less likely to come to our attention at all.

Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days

Your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. What's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But you don't decide what gets in - and more importantly, you don't see what gets edited out.

I think it's easier than ever to hear only what you want to hear. That doesn't make a good citizen.