Diaspora Instead of Facebook September 6, 2010

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sep 6, 2010 10:58 PM
Fwd: [p2p-research] Fwd: [LeftLibertarian2] F*** Facebook, Consider *Diaspora*

Here is some information I think needs to be disseminated widely those of you
 who are interested in privacy and so forth. There is a new social
network called
 Diaspora that is open-sourced, decentralized, non-corporate, personally
 controlled, and do-it-all that is comming out real soon (15th of this month I
 think). I would encourage everyone to seriously consider joining this new
 network and abandon the corporately owned and controlled network Facebook and
 tell all your friends about Diaspora.
 <http://www.joindiaspora.com/index.html>
 Mark

 <http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/>
 Facebook's Gone Rogue; It's Time for an Open Alternative

 * By Ryan Singel * May 7, 2010 * 6:58 pm * Categories: Social Media

 Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg's dreams
 of world domination. It's time the rest of the web ecosystem
 recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and
 distributed.
 Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends
 and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you
 were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to
 connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. Even if
 you didn't really want to keep up with them.
 Soon everybody — including your uncle Louie and that guy you hated
 from your last job — had a profile.
 And Facebook realized it owned the network.
 Then Facebook decided to turn "your" profile page into your
 identity online — figuring, rightly, that there's money and
 power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that,
 the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it
 was public.
 So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it
 reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile
 information public by default. That includes the city that you live in,
 your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes
 you've signed onto.
 This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as
 things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages.
 If you don't want them linked and made public, then you don't
 get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in
 order to let advertisers target you.
 This includes your music preferences, employment information, reading
 preferences, schools, etc. All the things that make up your profile.
 They all must be public — and linked to public pages for each of
 those bits of info — or you don't get them at all. That's
 hardly a choice, and the whole system is maddeningly complex
 <http://www.baekdal.com/opinion/facebook-is-dying-social-is-not/> .
 Simultaneously, the company began shipping your profile information off
 pre-emptively to Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft — so that if you show
 up there while already logged into Facebook, the sites can
 "personalize" your experience when you show up. You can try to
 opt out after the fact, but you'll need a master's in Facebook
 bureaucracy to stop it permanently.
 Care to write a status update to your friends? Facebook sets the default
 for those messages to be published to the entire internet through direct
 funnels to the net's top search engines. You can use a dropdown
 field to restrict your publishing, but it's seemingly too hard for
 Facebook to actually remember that's what you do. (Google Buzz, for
 all the criticism it has taken, remembers your setting from your last
 post and uses that as the new default.)
 Now, say you you write a public update, saying, "My boss had a crazy
 great idea for a new product!" Now, you might not know it, but there
 is a Facebook page for "My Crazy Boss" and because your post had
 all the right words, your post now shows up on that page. Include the
 words "FBI" or "CIA," and you show up on the FBI or CIA
 page.
 Then there's the new Facebook "Like" button littering the
 internet. It's a great idea, in theory — but it's completely
 tied to your Facebook account, and you have no control over how it is
 used. (No, you can't like something and not have it be totally
 public.)
 Then there's Facebook's campaign against outside services. There
 was the Web 2.0 suicide machine that let you delete your profile by
 giving it your password. Facebook shut it down.
 Another company has an application that will collect all your updates
 from services around the web into a central portal — including from
 Facebook — after you give the site your password to log in to
 Facebook. Facebook is suing the company and alleging it is breaking
 criminal law by not complying with its terms of service.
 No wonder 14 privacy groups filed a unfair-trade complaint
 <http://epic.org/2010/05/new-facebook-privacy-complaint.html> with the
 FTC against Facebook on Wednesday.
 Mathew Ingram at GigaOm wrote a post entitled "The Relationship
 Between Facebook and Privacy: It's Really Complicated
 <http://gigaom.com/2010/05/06/the-relationship-between-facebook-and-priv\
 acy-its-really-complicated/> ."
 No, that's just wrong. The relationship is simple: Facebook thinks
 that your notions of privacy — meaning your ability to control
 information about yourself — are just plain old-fashioned. Head
 honcho Zuckerberg told a live audience in January that Facebook is
 simply responding to changes in privacy mores
 <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_\
 of_privacy_is_ov.php> , not changing them — a convenient, but
 frankly untrue, statement.
 In Facebook's view, everything (save perhaps your e-mail address)
 should be public. Funny too about that e-mail address, for Facebook
 would prefer you to use its e-mail–like system that censors the
 messages sent between users
 <http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/facebooks-e-mail-censorship-is-l\
 egally-dubious-experts-say/> .
 Ingram goes onto say, "And perhaps Facebook doesn't make it as
 clear as it could what is involved, or how to fine-tune its privacy
 controls — but at the same time, some of the onus for doing these
 things has to fall to users."
 What? How can it fall to users when most of the choices don't'
 actually exist? I'd like to make my friend list private. Cannot.
 I'd like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss.
 Cannot.
 I'd like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the
 world knowing. Cannot.
 Setting up a decent system for controlling your privacy on a web service
 shouldn't be hard. And if multiple blogs are writing posts
 explaining how to use your privacy system, you can take that as a sign
 you aren't treating your users with respect, It means you are
 coercing them into choices they don't want using design principles.
 That's creepy.
 Facebook could start with a very simple page of choices: I'm a
 private person, I like sharing some things, I like living my life in
 public. Each of those would have different settings for the myriad of
 choices, and all of those users could then later dive into the control
 panel to tweak their choices. That would be respectful design – but
 Facebook isn't about respect — it's about re-configuring the
 world's notion of what's public and private.
 So what that you might be a teenager and don't get that
 college-admissions offices will use your e-mail address to find possibly
 embarrassing information about you. Just because Facebook got to be the
 world's platform for identity by promising you privacy and then
 later ripping it out from under you, that's your problem. At least,
 according to the bevy of privacy hired guns the company brought in at
 high salaries to provide cover for its shenanigans.
 Clearly Facebook has taught us some lessons. We want easier ways to
 share photos, links and short updates with friends, family, co-workers
 and even, sometimes, the world.
 But that doesn't mean the company has earned the right to own and
 define our identities.
 It's time for the best of the tech community to find a way to let
 people control what and how they'd like to share. Facebook's
 basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of
 interoperating software and services can flourish.
 Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software
 such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking.
 You'd get to control what unknown people get to see, while the
 people you befriend see a different, more intimate page. They could be
 using a free service that's ad-supported, which could be offered by
 Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, a bevy of startups or web-hosting services
 like Dreamhost.
 "Like" buttons around the web could be configured to do exactly
 what you want them to — add them to a protected profile or get added
 to a wish list on your site or broadcast by your micro-blogging service
 of choice. You'd be able to control your presentation of self —
 and as in the real world, compartmentalize your life.
 People who just don't want to leave Facebook could play along as
 well — so long as Facebook doesn't continue creepy data
 practices like turning your info over to third parties, just because one
 of your contacts takes the "Which Gilligan Island character are
 you?" quiz? (Yes, that currently happens)
 Now, it might not be likely that a loose confederation of software
 companies and engineers can turn Facebook's core services into
 shared protocols, nor would it be easy for that loose coupling of
 various online services to compete with Facebook, given that it has 500
 million users. Many of them may be fine having Facebook redefine their
 cultural norms, or just be too busy or lazy to leave.
 But in the internet I'd like to live in, we'd have that option,
 instead of being left with the choice of letting Facebook use us, or
 being left out of the conversation altogether.
 Photo: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg gives the keynote at
 SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, 2009.
 Jim Merithew/Wired.com

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