Privacy is created by social norms. It's no technical challenge for me to borrow your paper mail from your mailbox, steam it open, read it, copy the bits I find interesting, seal it up again, and replace it in your mailbox. But, in doing so, it's understood that I'm doing an awful thing. It's so awful that it's against the law:

http://www.wbrz.com/news/postal-workers-accused-of-tampering...

... and, all else being equal, juries will not be inclined to sympathize with me.

Similarly, it's somewhere between very rude and illegal, depending on circumstances, to intercept or interfere with someone's email. If you happen to glance at someone's email you're expected to keep politely silent about it, as you would be if you happened to glimpse your neighbor through a window of their house. You're certainly expected, under pain of felony charges, not to tamper with or forge someone's email, just as you're expected to avoid entering your neighbor's house without knocking even if the front door is standing open.

Google, on the other hand, seems to be constantly trying to establish the precedent that it's perfectly normal and polite for any aspect of your life - currently including, but presumably not forever limited to: the state of your front yard, the contents of your photo album, the list of movies you've watched on YouTube, and the contents of your mailbox - to be sampled, data-mined, correlated, and archived forever by entities completely outside your knowledge or control so long as those entities are using secret algorithms to do it.

If you'd tolerate this behavior in a friend, you may by all means continue to have Google as a friend. I, however, am getting increasingly uncomfortable with Google sitting in my living room, and am increasingly tempted to escort them politely but firmly to the door and then deliberately misplace their address.

Oldies which add value and continue to make money: affiliates (travel, mortgage, credit cards, insurance, etc continue to print money, though barriers to entry are much higher than they once were). Lead gen remains a multibillion dollar industry.

There are many companies with six/seven/eight figure sales of unsexy software, not all of which is SaaS on a monthly basis yet. (Though it probably should be :) ). Time tracking, invoicing, collaboration, and all the other usual suspects for freelancers each support more than a dozen companies. Business productivity/communication/collaboration tools. There are thousand niche things you'd never think of if you didn't love a vertical to death. (e.g. Solving the problems of multi property landlords... with software. There's one guy whose supports four families with a very specialized spreadsheet wrapped in a Swing app.)

Traditional web page hosting continues to make money. (Not everyone loves VPSes or AWS. Your local bakery has to get on the net somehow...) There are ecosystems around e.g. wordpress themes and shopping carts for getting the Fortune Five million on the Internet. These support marketplace sites, affiliates, etc etc.

Niche publishing plus ads remains lucrative in many sectors. If you dominate the Internet for Christmas cookie recipes, that is about equivalent to a full-time job as a cookbook author. Every similarly sized field of human endeavor makes someone the 68% that Google isn't taking.

E-commerce still exists. Pick something you can buy: fishing rods, for example. Someone makes a living selling fishing rods online, I'll guarantee you.

When Path states they didn't realize users would feel deceived and that they only intended to use the information to make better suggestions for the user's contact list, well, I don't want to sound cynical, but I think anyone who blindly believes these kinds of statements (from Path, Facebook, or any other company) is either personally/financially interested or extremely naive.

Good for you. Even better for you is the fact that you recognize your opportunity. How sad that so many people in your situation never do until it's too late.

Now, when I say “smart people,” I don’t mean that guy who always wins trivia night. I mean, blazingly intelligent individuals who are regarded as the pre-eminent scholars in their field.

There are many vectors of smartness in both magnitude and direction. Some of the smartest people I've ever known never went to college. You don't have to be a "pre-eminent scholar" to be smart and there's nothing wrong with winning trivia night.

It’s pretty amazing to pass by Turing Award winners and leading political science scholars grabbing a sandwich.

The smarter you get the less amazing that will feel.

Before I go anywhere, let me make one thing clear: I am not one of these smart people.

Hmmm, not sure I like the sound of that. Where are you going with this?

This is perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned after 3 years here.

Then it's a good thing you have one more year. Hopefully you'll learn a bigger lesson. (Read on...)

There is an absolutely incredible number of smart people in the world, and I can name a whole bunch of students and professors alike who I know for a fact I will never ever ever be as smart as, no matter how hard I try.

How sad to hear you say that...

The purpose of college is not to become a greater repository of data.

The purpose of college is not to become a better accumulator of data.

The purpose of college is not to become better than anyone or anything else.

The purpose of college is to see the possibilities and put yourself in position to go after them.

You may not believe me now, but you are probably a whole lot smarter than many people, including the smart ones you cite, at something, perhaps many things. And once you put yourself on the shoulders of giants, including your own, you can geometrically catapult yourself into much higher spheres of measure, including "smartness". But even then, so what?

It's now how smart you are, you rich you are, or even you good you are, it's what you can imagine doing with all those "assets" and how you can positively affect the lives of others. If you learn nothing else in college, I sincerely hope that you come away with this mindset.

...but I have noticed one overarching theme among smart people: they ask questions.

Wow. It sounds like you learned something in college that I didn't learn until years later. And I thought I was so smart.

After all, I don’t want this person to think I’m a moron.

Smart people don't care about that.

The intonation of the question and the intensity with which the professor listened to the response definitively suggested that the professor’s question was genuine, and that the answer was of great importance.

What a great lesson. Which reminds me that two of the smartest things you can ever do is keep learning and keep teaching. Thank you.

Smart people challenge the very limit of human understanding, and push the envelope of what’s possible farther than many people would argue it’s meant to be pushed. Smart people don’t take claims at face value, and smart people don’t rest until they find an explanation they’re comfortable accepting and understanding.

Therefore, you become smarter simply by claiming that you're smarter, right? (Notice this is the opposite of "I know for a fact I will never ever ever be as smart as, no matter how hard I try.".)

Smart people challenge everything.

Hmmm, I wonder if "challenge everything" = "see the possibilities". I think I've learned something.

(You know who taught me that? A smart person.)

That's great, but please don't overlook all that you can learn from people that may not seem so smart.

Maybe someday, people will call me a smart person.

The smartest thing you can ever do is stop caring how smart others think you are.

For now, I’m going to keep asking them questions.

I take back what I said before. It sounds like you've already learned more in 3 years than many learn in a lifetime. But you probably already knew that, being as smart as you are.

Thanks for the great post and the chance for interesting discussion. I feel smarter already.

[EDIT: Any notion that I was making fun or teasing OP was most definitely unintended. This was a great post! (Sounds like I now need a <NoSarcasm> tag.)]