TIm Samoff via Flickr Every few months, the Internet erupts in outrage about some new threat to our privacy.

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg made some offhand remarks about the age of privacy being over? Or when Facebook introduced Beacon, which took info about your shopping habits and shared it with advertisers?

Or how about when Google CEO (at the time) Eric Schmidt talked about how you could "just move" if you didn't like your home being filmed for Google StreetView? (He was joking, maybe.) Or when Google Buzz did whatever it did with your Gmail info? Remember that one?

Probably not.

Each time this happens, bloggers and privacy zealots scream and yell and pull their hair out. In some cases, the companies are forced to apologize and cancel the offending feature. Sometimes, a few politicians grandstand so they can look like they're solving real problems and maybe the government gets involved and forces the companies to change a little bit.

But these flaps had exactly zero effect on Facebook's and Google's business. No effect. None. Nada. User growth, engagement, revenue -- all kept going up without a blip.

Normal people don't care.

Now, the cranks and bloggers are up in arms about Path, which was apparently uploading users' iPhone address books to its servers. It provided a great excuse for some very angry people to vent their frustration about completely unrelated topics. (Mat Honan at Gizmodo has a light-hearted summary with links if you haven't been following along but suddenly crave the bitter taste of bile.)

Turns out a bunch of other iPhone apps do it too. Cue the outrage against Apple! (Wait a day or two, it's coming. Update: Between the time I started and finished this post, it came.)

This whole Path thing follows the non-flap a couple weeks ago when Google changed its privacy policies, or rather formalized and consolidated a bunch of policies that were already in place. Microsoft in particular saw a great opportunity to cast aspersions on its rival and took out full-page newspaper ads talking about how its products would always respect your privacy because Microsoft doesn't make its money from advertising, or something.

It's true that some tech companies are often kind of sneaky, taking your personal information without really getting your permission and using it in ways that you might not anticipate. Some even lie about it. Sneaky.

But the level of outrage far outweighs the worst possible consequences.

Nobody ever seems to think through, realistically, what could actually happen with this supposedly valuable and sacred personal information that companies are collecting.

So let's do a thought experiment here.

Say you have a friend who uses Path. Path just uploaded his entire address book. It wasn't encrypted in transit, which means that some bad guy could have intercepted it. (Let's use our very active imaginations to imagine that there are bad guys like this, who sniff wires all day looking for address book information rather than, say, bank account numbers.)

So what are they going to do with that info?

"Well, come on," you sputter. "Now they know where I live!"

Gosh. If you own a house in most places in the U.S., anybody can go down to the county records office and not only find out where you live, but also how much you paid for your house and how much you sold it for 10 years later. It's a matter of public record.

Guess who else knows where you live:

Any company who employed you while you live where you live now.