What is privacy? or Why should privacy statements become interactive and standardized ? - Part II

So, in the previous post, we understood that none really want you to read their privacy policy.
It doesn't mean none cares about your information, though. In fact, everybody wants your information.
It allows them to do amazing things.
It allows a couple of PHP or Ruby scripts, a MySQL DB and some basic GUI design to become a multi-billion dollar company.
This price, of course, is that of your privacy and information.

In fact, we could think about social networking as a noisy bar owner. But this bar owner doesn't take advantage that he knows something about you to (maybe that you drive this kind of car or that you work at the near by software company) by sharing information with some other customer you don't know (usually it's - "Hey Joe, you understand computers right? See Jack here has this faulty monitor....").
Oh no, it's far worse. Because this bar owner sites around all day doing nothing and just wait for you and your friends to come in.
When you do, he sends you to sit on rather plain looking furniture, with a rather plain looking waitress, and throws in some silly games none really wants to play but, hey, some guy said he's better than you in one of them, so you gotta go for it. While you're trying to have fun (I admit that some people do have genuine good old fun from these games) the bar owner unleash an army of sale people to listen to the different discussion between your friends (even the little small talk you had with the nice blonde girl from the office).
Not only that, from time to time they offer you something to buy that relates to what you've just talked about. It's like having a commercial announcer as a friend. You can say that ad words and small commercials, are far less annoying then what I've just described. Could be, but think about this situation for a minute. What would you do if that would happen to you? You'd probably leave this bar never to return!
You would probably never buy anything from the company that employed those stokers (sorry, sale people).

Indeed, this situation is impossible in "real life", but it is now possible with social networks. No wonder that the companies that operate the servers hosting your details (it's not a lot more than that) worth so much money? They've invented a way to get access to information that wasn't available before to anyone. They also allow people to generate new information. And there are bigger players (like Google) that make money of information. Of people creating new information and digitizing it (like I'm doing as I type these very post).

And what's the practical thing I want to make out of this post? Well, I want to suggest a way, any way, to help people to be aware of what kind of details they reveal about them selfs, and to force websites to reveal exactly what they are doing with your data (at least typecast it into a given privacy category; for example, the worst category would be - "sell it to reluctant spammers" and the best one would be - "data will be deleted in a few moments").

What do you think about this little suggestion? I will of course elaborate in future posts, but I would be happy to hear what you think.