Eric Schmidt's now infamous quote during a CNBC interview sums up how companies offering social networking services think about privacy, "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." Or does it? Facebook has been stumbling with privacy policy changes and now plans to share user data with external sites automatically. That is scary. Very scary.

Is Facebook betting that it has reached such a large size (400 million active users) that users will not retaliate by leaving en masse? Or is it that they are confident that the alternatives are just as bad? Rather, we would like to ask, does this represent an opportunity for someone to compete with Facebook or is this the only way they can achieve the revenue they would like to see?

When I first got my G1 (aka Google Phone) and later N1 (Nexus One) a friend argued that he would never buy such a product as it does not respect his privacy. I paused for a second and wondered, just how much I cared about my own privacy. An American might feel very protective of his/her personal information whereas someone whose constantly searched a little 'extra' and 'randomly' selected for more thorough screening at airports may have a completely different take on it.

Yahoo's acquisition of Maktoob posed an interesting challenge to Google, whose approach has been slow and calculated. The truth of the matter is, there are millions of Arabic-speaking Internet users who are not interested in English-based content. So, Yahoo bought their way in.

Google appears to have gone their own way and decided to build their own base. The Egyptian Egabat (egabat.google.com) is the answer. As a product, it is completely uninteresting. It offers nothing that is new or exciting, except that it is an Arabic-only product. In fact, it's so Arabic it's Egyptian.

Now I understand that Google recruits a lot of their Middle East staff from Egypt, but the Egyptian branding of their first Arabic-only product is curious, to put it mildly. It is either Google doesn't understand the region or that their staff are taking this as an opportunity to highlight Egypt's importance in the region.