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Free Software To Save Us From Social Networks
Glyn Moody writes "Here's a problem for free software: most social networks are built using it, yet through their constant monitoring of users they do little to promote freedom. Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and the legal brains behind several versions of the GNU GPL, thinks that the free software world needs to fix this with a major new hardware+software project. 'The most attractive hardware is the ultra-small, ARM-based, plug it into the wall, wall-wart server. [Such] an object can be sold to people at a very low one-time price, and brought home and plugged into an electrical outlet and plugged into a wall jack for the Ethernet, and you're done. It comes up, it gets configured through your Web browser on whatever machine you want to have in the apartment with it, and it goes and fetches all your social networking data from all the social networking applications, closing all your accounts. It backs itself up in an encrypted way to your friends' plugs, so that everybody is secure in the way that would be best for them, by having their friends holding the secure version of their data.' Could such a plan work, or is it simply too late to get people to give up their Facebook accounts for something that gives them more freedom?"
....and suggest that most people don't care.
You mean people would actually have to SPEND MONEY? And even worse, on an actual PHYSICAL OBJECT? No way, not in a million years would something like this replace a simple, free online service.
Better known as 318230.
Seriously, its a dumb plan. My girlfriend is on Facebook, and I'm pretty sure she would have the following objections:
1) New people couldn't find her.
2) This new plan is already WAY too complicated. She can't point a browser at some weird piece of hardware that she has to install herself, no matter how "easy" it is to install or point to.
3) She can't play with her facebook farm(s).
Remember that facebook is now the #1 site when it comes to traffic. You aren't going to get it's 500 million or so users to migrate to a self configurable system simply in the name of privacy. What percentage of the users on facebook actually care? On quarter of one percent? Even that would be a stretch. People aren't going to leave their hard earned farmville accounts because facebook is using their personal data to market to them. It's not a concern in this day and age.
I am getting pretty tired of other people telling me what freedom should mean to me.
What freedom means to me, what I am frightened of and / or prepared to sacrifice is not a temporally static concept. 10 years ago I wouldn't even publish my mail address online. Now I have my entire cv on xing. These are rational decisions I made according to costs I perceive (correctly or not) with publishing personal information, or not.
Sure, some people make poor choices about publishing personal information (sexting, anyone?). But some times openness is an indicator for a "safe" society.
Just my thoughts.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
Let's just go with how the conversation with any non-geek person/friend/spouse/family member would both start and end: Wait, Facebook already is free. I don't get it.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Who the hell would use this? How many people are really that desperate to escape social networks? People who REALLY didn't want them would never have signed up in the first place. People who used to like them and don't anymore, can just spend a couple hours tracking it all down. Mightn't people who use this want to customize its exact effects? Isn't the easiest way to do that...to just close your accounts yourself?
This sounds like something a sixth-grader would come up with...
The problem is free software is used to voluntarily erode privacy rights.
Not anymore! Now we have a server that looks like a night-light, just plug it in and it will do all your social networking for you! It's magic! No longer will you have to give up your privacy rights! ...
Do I have the argument right?
Could such a plan work, or is it simply too late to get people to give up their Facebook accounts for something that gives them more freedom?
This plan assumes that your average Facebook user wants freedom and/or privacy.
this is my sig
The network effect has already kicked in. If you want to replace Facebook it will have to be with a product that offers more value on an individual user basis AND can interface with Facebook so users will have access to those social networks as well as access to the additional functionality. If you start there you can wean people off of the older application. While the approach you describe may give users more freedom from corporate/government/whoever control it gives them less freedom to do the activities they now do on the social networking site.
So what is this "your data" that he wants to fetch? I don't think most people are aware of having any "data" on social networks. Their favorite bands, their favorite movies... that's not "data," it's information about themselves that they post to social networks because they want other people to know it.
The problem with commercial social networks is their interpretation of what "your data" is. The stuff they're interested in has less to do with whether you say you like Blink 182 and more to do with who all your friends are, how often you communicate with them, what keywords show up most often in your posts, what groups you join and who else is in them, and all that other stuff that can be data-mined. In other words, it's the record of your social interactions that's the "data" -- so why would you want to preserve that in a brand-new network?
Breakfast served all day!
I have pondered the idea of a decentralized Social networking protocol, similar to email/Jabber/etc. Standard IM protocols along with standard (XML based?) data formatting for social information would be used to allow socialnetworking servers to talk to each other, and find friends.
The issue is that SOME sort of centralization is probably best for this kind of online interaction; the question is to what extent your secure content is hosted and in your own control.
Best option: Don't put private shit in a public place.
So, the people at facebook "constantly monitor users" and "do little to promote freedom"? And we wonder why the FSF is written off as a fringe organization?
Do you have ESP?
Speaking as one who uses Free rather than Open Source to characterize software, and admires Richard Stallman....
Why does every piece of software on the planet need to promote freedom? Isn't it enough that a whole lot of it does? And why shouldn't I feel free to put selected information about myself in the public view? (Seriously, you're all welcome to whatever is on my Facebook account. There are things I don't want the whole world to know about, and they're not on FB. I trust FB to respect my privacy in much the same sense that I trust mousetraps to catch and restrain blue whales, but I don't have to put stuff on it.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Social networking sites are far more than "informatiuon about a few million people". Their value comes from the relationships between those people. This have value to the people themselves, and, fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on where one lies on the marketting/privacy divide, to others. It's restricting this access to others and controlling information about one's self, that's the appeal of this device.
However, maintaining all those relationships distributed across they myriad of individual servers in each home will prove problematic: one essentially has a distributed database. The first issues that come to mind are location services, mapping "friend" links to their wall-wart servers (yes, this is DNS, but do you want to be that visible?), as well as backups. The network traffic involved in simple "friend of friend" graphing starts to get significant.
In such an environment Facebook would likely spider all the wall-wart servers in a Googlesque manner for (a) marketting, and (b) convenience.
Still, it's a concept I've pondered for a while: I should control information about me, and who I share it with. Replication and backup becomes a separate problem: perhaps I want some storage service provider to host it... perhaps not: connections to port 25 at a server resolved from my domain name have terminated on a PC in my home for years: if my physical mailbox is outside my house, why should my electronic one not be inside (cursing static IP rental costs aside)?
In this model, "Facebook" becomes an "app", that people download to their home servers and use to establish and publish relationships between their friends.
In Liberty, Rene
It's called the World Wide Web. People hated it because it wasn't constrained and limited enough.
I am totally serious. It's one of those things (actually a very common phenomenon) where putting constraints on something, opens peoples' eyes as to how it can be used, and makes it seem cooler. But then they forget that they can still do those same things, even without the limitations present. Life is weird.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Well, I for one wouldn't have any use for that, because I'm not on facebook & co. anyway.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Free Software had first mover advantage over the big brother social network sites but it didn't innovate fast enough. Remember blogs? What happened? The community couldn't agree on standards for providing advanced social applications that people wanted, so the walled gardens sprang up that provided them. Seriously, remember the years of dumb ass bickering over RSS or Atom?
I personally am very sad that large parts of the social experience online are now within wall gardens, I see it as AOL's revenge from the grave. It says something about the limits of open processes that hopefully the Free Software movement and others can learn from.
So register under a pseudonym. Worried that people will still tag you under your real name? They're probably doing that now, regardless of whether you have an account or not. It's people that are the problem, not Facebook.
You prefer email, but you wish it was more like Facebook? Try Facebook messaging, it's like email but it's on Facebook. Seriously though, email doesn't promote intellectual debate, it just allows you to contact people. Just like messaging on Facebook does. I've had hugely inane discussions on email, and in-depth philosophical debates on Facebook messaging. Again, it's the person and not the medium.
Blogs, news, links, pictures and videos? It sounds kinda like Facebook. Except of course that none of your friends were there, so when they joined up and none of their friends were there, the whole experience seemed rather pointless - compared to Facebook, where they could actually communicate with people. Once a site like Facebook hits critical mass in terms of user numbers, it's almost impossible to persuade people to move to a new site, even if it offers compelling new features.
As for the remainder of your points, I'm mostly in agreement. I use Facebook because all of my friends are there, and there's no other way to conveniently keep up with them all. I find the service really useful. I'm certainly not happy about some of the ramifications in terms of privacy, but I do my best to exacerbate them, and the remainder is just a trade-off between security and convenience.