“These ‘Student Locator’ programs are ultimately aimed at getting students used to living in a total surveillance state where there will be no privacy, and wherever you go and whatever you text or email will be watched by the government.”
Out of curiosity, are you more afraid of the government having that goal and enabling that environment or Facebook/Google/Foursquare/etc? Why? I think this is an interesting discussion.
Every time I visit a page with a little FB "Like" button on it, Facebook knows (via a cookie) what page I've visited. They track people even if they don't have accounts. It's not so easy to opt out of that. (I installed ShareMeNot for Firefox but it's not obvious that you can do that.)
That only works until FB (or Google or whoever) starts using IP addresses in their CDN URLs, or Google hard-codes DNS values for Google analytics servers into Chrome, or whatever. ShareMeNot prevents the browser from even trying to fetch the content.
Out of curiosity, are you more afraid of the government having that goal and enabling that environment or Facebook/Google/Foursquare/etc? Why? I think this is an interesting discussion.