Eben Moglen: Social Networking "Creating Systems of Comprehensive Surveillance"

An anonymous reader writes "Eben Moglen, founder of the Freedombox project, has taken to yelling at journalists reporting about social networks. One wonders if this messaging will work to end proprietary, centralized social networks or not."

Comments

Re:Moglen is right

[Ethanol-fueled]

Mr. Moglen: Okay, so have you closed your Facebook account and stopped using Twitter?
Reporter: Have...I?
Mr. Moglen: Yes, you!
Reporter: No, I can't!

Yup.

Reporter can't what? Can't keep in touch with people via e-mail and telephone calls? Can't restrict online vanity to anonymous postings? Can't learn lessons they should have learned back in the MySpace and Classmates days? Can't gain reputability with a pseudonym like Jolly Roger or Ethanol-fueled?

the history of the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

proprietary, centralized social networks or no

The entire history of the internet is one of moving from open and decentralized facilities to proprietary and central authorities.

IM: IRC -> a ton of separate proprietary apps
Discussions: usenet -> a ton of separate web-forum fiefdoms
Email: RFC based email -> proprietary solutions on facebook and so on
Personal web pages -> using central proprietary services like facebook

This all seems idiotic and totally the wrong direction to me, but there's no way of denying the fact that for whatever reason, Joe Sixpack prefers a more authoritarian and more proprietary approach to the internet, as opposed to a more equal/peer-to-peer and open-standard approach.

Re:Moglen is right

[whoever57]

Moglen comes across as a complete dick in that interview, and quite hysterical, with a bit of a big-brother fetish. Much like Doctorow (also mentioned in TFA) who seems to revel in his little-brother fantasies entirely too much.

No, the reporter is the dick. Moglen is just consistently putting forward his point and the reporter is lamely making excuses for his failure to accept the advice. Anyone who asks for advice and then makes lame excuses for not following it it is a dick.

Re:Not even FB can figure it out...

[Bob9113]

I remain skeptical. I'm a regular FB poster, and not even FB can target ads to me that I care about.

I've done it. I worked for an online advertising company in San Francisco. They were all about human-based targeting, done by our placement specialists. I wanted to show them what collaborative filtering could do, so I wrote a running an algorithm similar to what Netflix uses. Ran it in a one month randomized A/B test against ads targeted by our pros using demographics. For every dollar they sold during the run, I sold 3.8 dollars.