MyBlogLog - why opt out?

I know I’m a little late to this conversation, but I’ve been gnawing on sound bytes like Arrington’s:

Still, I turned off the data collection and display feature for my account at MyBlogLog. I guess I haven’t gotten so used to the notion that all of our privacy is already dead that I am comfortable seeing my name and sites I’ve visited on a publicly available website.

And subsequently, MyBlogLog rolled out their brilliant in-roll opt-out feature, which, as Fred Wilson described, lets you simply x out your profile on any page that you’re visiting. I think that’s a brilliant solution.

But I don’t understand why people are so eager to opt-out.

I understand that the issue is “privacy,” and I get that. Privacy is important. That’s why I don’t keep a RootVault, and it’s one of the reasons I don’t always fill in complete (or correct) profiles on networking services.

But this isn’t really a privacy issue. This is an embarrassment issue and a missed networking opportunity. I keep a Reader Roll in my sidebar, and I like to check out the new faces when they show up. I know I get more traffic than one person every week and a half, so I assume a lot of people are opting-out of the reader roll.

Why? Because they don’t want anyone to know they’ve been to my blog? Reader Rolls are brilliant precisely because they harness this seamless networking potential - it helps create badly needed communities within the blogosphere based on what people read. Opting-out is like going into a retail store with a bag over your head so nobody knows who is shopping there. It doesn’t make sense!