I just posted this over at JD's MX blog, where we are conversing about the issue of risk. What I keep coming back to is that the belief common to the techno-community that the effects of technological innovation can be (a) predicted, (b) managed securely and (c) communicated with a minimum of muss and fuss is perhaps a tad overly sanguine:

I think I can see more clearly now how the gap between producer and end user is less just a fillable hole and more like a discontinuity. You invite me to point to "ambiguities," but the problem is that we are less in a realm of ambiguity - a relatively mild form of semantic suspense - than in a mode of radical uncertainty. See, for example, a comment like this on a blog I just now ran across:

"I don't believe the reassurances that users will have to click "allow" because we already see the tendencies of interfaces to use default settings and "opt out" clauses that are very hard for newbies to be aware of or even find--these border collie web-style herding exercises online being mostly practiced by Microsoft in setting browser defaults for the helper PLUGINs. Yeah, them again." (from http://radio.weblogs.com/0109581/2002/11/27.html)

The point is, we are beyond clarifying ambiguous speech and far into the realm of trust, confusion, and potential mischief. There is no way some privacy manual is going to dispel this. I do have one suggestion: Every ad and every instance of Flash 6 which carries this capability should have a warning label clearly in evidence: e.g., "Caution - this ad could be watching or listening to you - click for details." Anything less obtrusive just doesn't meet the standard for respecting the privacy of people at home or at work.