> Unfortunately, deleting your Facebook account won’t help.
Yes, it will. In fact, it may be the only thing that will help.
Facebook has shown willingness to make unpopular changes if it can get away with it--and it always gets away with it. The fact that an informed and visible critic like the author can't even manage to give it up is a case study in why Facebook can and will keep calling bluffs. Complaints mean nothing if you are giving the site the same eyeball time. Facebook's success is due to the size of its social network. The network effect works both ways, though; if enough people leave then those remaining will have less incentive to stay on board, and the network will unravel inversely to how it was built. Only when the eyeball count starts declining will Facebook take users' wishes seriously.
I have email, irc, a telephone (both voice and SMS, and signal type apps), a physical mailbox, and people can actually come over and visit in addition to all of that. I can also communicate via third parties. "John wants you to call him", I've heard.
I never had a facebook account. I don't have trouble keeping up with family, friends, or work. And I have more free time. And less bullshit memes.
I think I can survive another several decades without facebook.
Chiming in alongside the other posts to say that I have never felt like I was isolated after deleting my FB account 6 years ago.
There are plenty of sources for news and events (I find that Twitter is great for this) and I easily keep up to date with friends and family via a mix of messaging apps.
I felt some relief after deleting my facebook account almost 5 years ago now. It has left me with more time to focus on things that actually matter, in addition to helping me narrow down who I really need in my life in terms of "friends".
Over the election season I contemplated deleting my FB account, just because of how ugly the feed became with partisans being uncivil about everything.
I've found that turning Facebook into solely a consumption platform has worked really well. I spend maybe 15 minutes per week total skimming my feed for meaningful updates. I will never go back to contributing content to FB. I no longer engage in any discussions, which makes it a lot less annoying and stressful. It's essentially a personal RSS feed in this formulation.
I keep in contact with everyone I want to and don't need facebook to do so. It's a bubble, albeit a billion+ user bubble.
The reality is that every second you spend on facebook you are dying and the faster you realize that the further into humanity's future you will reach.
We are always dying, and I doubt Facebook kills much faster than HN as most of the lethality comes from sitting still while reading. Of course, FB comes with extra stress for some, but I don't know how the cyber bullying on FB stacks up with the workplace rage from Excel.
It's true that sitting and reading isn't really going to help you live any longer. If you're going to read, however, you should at least get something meaningful out of it.
It may be different for some, but I get much more out of HN than I ever did when I used Facebook.
the narrative that puts you in isolation if you don't use facebook is just wrong.
This is the excuse that made the author of that post keeping his account, and one the reason fb is successful.
* A group of my friends who play badminton together organize weekly events only through Facebook. They use "Going/Not going" as a way of knowing how many people are coming.
* One of my friends organizes film nights occasionally. Again, he does it through Facebook. He sets the date differently each time, so that all people can attend at least sometime. There is no info about this outside Facebook and we do not meet in real life otherwise (he is not my coworker and he lives in a different part of town).
Is what you are suggesting really "cut from your life a portion of your friends that synchronize only through Facebook"? Surely it will not lead to a complete isolation for me, but being an introverted person, it will reduce my social life by a significant margin.
This is what makes me keep mine too... events. Only events. Eventbrite is free but I've not hosted through it yet as I've not held (m)any events recently. That's a possible way out if it's low friction enough, seems most outgoing people in the BA have an EB account for concerts/meetups/etc... could possibly rally a couple people in your groups with anti-FB sentiment and pave the way off FB for these events. Many people I know feel somewhat trapped by some slice of FB/Google functionality so alternate suggestions could be welcome.
Same boat. I've dragged group conversations on to Signal, but events are a tough nut to crack. Something like meetup/eventbrite seems way too heavy for birthday drinks at a bar, and puts a sign-up/ToS/data burden on people who are interested in attending.
With most people on gmail and Google not being much better, IMAP/ActiveSync CalDAV invitations with all the invitees' names and email addresses aren't too satisfying either.
It's feature bloat, but I really hope an E2E event/calendar protocol makes it in to something like Signal or Riot/Matrix. Ideally it would consistently maintain state (e.g. changing place and time), update your calendar, and provide a place for invitees to chat.
This is the first I've heard of Retroshare. It looks interesting, but there's no way I'll be able to convert enough friends and family without a mobile app. I'm going to try out it out, though, and keep my fingers crossed.
The latter half of that is true, isn't it? And yet.
This is why you can't treat that type of statement as purely factual: so long as you're sharing a world with it, it's of a quine-like type which is always performative to speak, in a way, because how much people believe it on various levels (and thereby decide (or unconsciously "decide") things like "why should I bother to connect to these people when they won't even sign up for a free Facebook account to make it easier for me, since everyone knows that's just what you do") influences how true it is in a much stronger way than is the case for most objective statements.
In light of that, I wonder whether my having said the above is good or bad? Hard to tell.
I had one friend who convinced me to believe that there is a very small difference between facebook and a public restroom. I am out of facebook from 2009 and I am not isolated.
A competing product that would will steal their users would probably help even more even if users don't delete their accounts and just stop using it (did you delete your Myspace account?)... so the more bad features Facebook adds, the better.
You can also cut back, and it should help. Delete Facebook from your phone and only log in using a dedicated Chrome profile on a single desktop machine (or alternately, a browser you rarely use). Use some other way of communicating with close friends. You'll find you can go for days without checking it.
There are lots of people who check Facebook only occasionally. If everyone does this then it's basically like LinkedIn, not a core part of your life.
I've done this for years. Currently I'm doing the opposite because I wanted to see what that's like.
This is the boat I'm in. I log onto Facebook about once a week on my phone's browser. I keep in touch with family via Whatsapp (sure, it's owned by FB, but that's what my family uses) and text message/email to keep up with others. It's unsurprisingly bullshit free.
The weakest part of this essay is its conclusion. What to do - use Facebook? There's nothing else that can be done at this stage, really?
How about:
1. Go out of your way to support alternative distribution platforms such as the 'indie web', gnusocial, etc. (Whether through use, development, etc. Every bit helps.)
2. Figuring out some kind of movement or legislative action we can take to end free basics, since it's egregious monopoly behavior.
I just wished three families Happy Thanksgiving, by putting all three family members that I mainly contact in the To line of an email. Even included a picture of my family.
You can stay known to "anyone who happens to be listening," or you can stay intentionally engaged with "those people that you specifically care about." Both ways take very little effort.
Regarding Facebook, it's strange to feel like I'm not missing anything and simultaneously feel like I'm missing something.
Seriously. Bad conclusions. Facebook's news feed algorithms mean what users put into facebook has very little to do with what users get out of facebook. The author doesn't want to live in an "enlightened literati echo chamber", but is resigning himself to living in a algorithmic clickbate echo chamber.
"use facebook" is kind of a disingenuous summary of the conclusion. The author understands we should all stop using facebook, but the few people who understand this (e.g. that read this article) quitting facebook won't help anything.
I'm aware that the author wants us to leverage Facebook to dismantle it, and that might be a fine suggestion. But leaving that as the only advice on what the author considers to be an existential threat to the Internet is almost satire. (And especially in the way they wrote it, which basically boils down to "idle passive aggressively on Facebook".) I genuinely wondered for a moment if the author was controlled opposition.
"Facebook is already on our phones and computers, pestering us with notifications."
That quote from the article really baffled me. Facebook isn't on my phone or computer pestering me. That's because I choose not to use it. The article goes on to worry about the lack of a "disable notifications for good" option. Are people really that helpless? It makes it sound as if there is literally no choice but to use facebook. If facebook is really hurting your quality of life, then stop using it. Or at least uninstall the app.
A lot of people need to use Facebook to stay in touch with family members and friends they otherwise would not be able to communicate with due to distance, past, or what have you. This is a problem of "not enough good competition." Facebook has a de facto monopoly on social networking. Google tried in vain, but they lost miserably. Until someone can step up to Zuckerberg, Facebook will do what they want when it comes to shitty news, annoying notifications, and over-bloated web design. I've used Facebook since the day it was released. It used to be really, really good. Now it's just crap. I hope a new competitor shows them what's up.
It's really simple, if you need to be on Facebook, just set it up to send you notifications to your email. Only check Facebook when you get a notification.
If you want to talk to people, talk to them directly.
I'm hoping the competitor will be a light and universal Authentication+Authorization protocol under a ubiquitous set of service contracts like contacts, calendar, tasks, etc... the direction LiveJournal was going essentially, possibly with some modernized stack pieces. Paired with low energy+cost home servers like RasPis, reasonably reliable broadband in at least one extended family home, and perhaps some self-maintaining systems in the cloud with self-owned AWS keys similar to "mail in a box".
My thinking is you can present and recombine data in any number of ways and we have the tools to do it, there "just" needs to be some organization. One could even make an ironically named FakeBook that presents a familiar UI on top of a federated system. It could even import FB data dumps. I've lead a couple/few attempts to rally my techie friends to build something like this with limited success, though not since ~2008.
> It used to be really, really good. Now it's just crap. I hope a new competitor shows them what's up.
My last effort was cloning MySpace with open source stuff like XMPP but Facebook got really good during that time frame, kinda sad I didn't keep going now (hindsight). I made an AOL/AIM alternative in VB3 that a bunch of people at my high school were using in 2000 at age 15 when I got my first DSL line, no technical reasons anyone can't come out of left field and overthrow them esp. in 2016.
From parent:
> Are people really that helpless?
But as I've made my way around Silicon Valley, the "VHS vs Beta" anecdote keeps coming to mind as I see marketing dollars behind the proliferation of inferior but wildly popular tech. In my view now this is a war for attention FB is winning, the only way to overthrow FB is to really show people that it's a piece of the worst smelling thing you can imagine. I had a visceral reaction seeing Zuck in a suit, I can't be the only one--not disgust or anything, just that it wasn't a hoodie as his MO previously dictated... could sell the sell-out story to some, now, with deep implications on privacy/freedom of expression/access to "true" information.
Me either. Stop using Facebook and help make sure your friends and family stop using it as well. Encourage them to not use their Facebook login for anything, and ensure that they uninstall the app from their mobile phone. Explain to them the FakeNewsBook, the not giving a crap about user privacy, how the service makes people depressed and have low self esteem, and how much of a waste of time it is.
The problem with telling people to stop using Facebook is that they want some way to communicate with extended family and former friends.Before you can tell people to simply stop, you need a replacement. I have not yet seen a solution which would be able to replace Facebook for that purpose. Email is much clunkier and does not work to communicate with many people. IM and other messaging, including Signal, are quite different and can't be used to communicate with many people. There have been a few attempts, such as dispora, to federate Facebook but they have not caught on and may cause some problems with e.g. searchability.
When our first child was born we set up a telegram group to share photos and news. It encouraged both sides of our family to sign up. Now we all use telegram to communicate with each other rather than Facebook
Let's read parent comment again it says: "communicate with extended family and former friends"
Before Facebook and its ilk, part of the definition of "former friends" and "extended family" was that they are categorized as people you rarely communicate with, or not at all.
Before Facebook, you didn't need Facebook to ignore your former friend or to rarely talk to your second cousin on the other side of the continent. Today, you still don't need Facebook for this.
Call me out if I'm reaching here, but I think if people just used Facebook to figure out what the hell their 3rd cousin's phone number is, Facebook would totally collapse. I don't think that use case has to go away in order to kill what Facebook has become or what it threatens to become.
There are strong network externalities both to Facebook and to Google services. The more people use them, the better they are, and so much more higher are the opportunity costs of switching to other websites. Pleas won't change the incentives involved.
That being said, I think tech journalism overstates the amount of control which either Google and Facebook can actually exert over their users.
Google is to me what Facebook was a few years ago. I do have a Facebook account but don't want to use anything Google. Yet they have a sneaky way of trying to force you (and others) into it. I think it's scary just how well Google has done at shoehorning themselves into the education market. I frequently encounter kids that think google is the internet. They think all email is Gmail. They don't know other search engines exist. They only know YouTube, mostly because of Google's placement. They don't know there are other forms of Maps. (again, Google's placement of their own products.)
It's scary. Facebook hasn't gotten to that point. They've tried with mobile devices, and they were a flop. We don't see Facebook Maps yet or a lot of Facebook Videos or whatever being shared around.
I have been slowly migrating away from my gmail account and I intend to delete it very soon. I highly recommend Protonmail as an alternative web-based email provider.
This essay validates my decision to never create a Facebook account in the first place. I understand that this is not the authors conclusion, but it is my conclusion from reading the essay. I do not want to be a part of that eco system.
It is not in Facebook's monetary interest to identify or remove fake or questionable news from our news feeds. By it's nature, fake news is emotional. It causes an emotional, gut-level reaction ("OMG, must like and share this!") that promotes virality. Virality === $$$ for Facebook. I imagine they have already experimented with news feed filters that reduce noise and I'm sure the result was reduced engagement. As long as Facebook profits from attention, we should expect them to be tepid at best about any change that reduces their share of our attention.
Facebook should be nationalized and then the government should remove all advertising from the platform.
When a company has a monopoly over something, bureaucracy actually works - It slows things down, reduces risks, makes life better for employees and improves moral ethics within the company.
The fact that CEOs are legally bound to maximize profits doesn't make sense when the company already has a monopoly over its industry - The only way they can keep increasing profits is through scorched-earth policies which are damaging to society.
> The fact that CEOs are legally bound to maximize profits..
this is, in fact, not a fact. ceo's of corporations are hired to execute their corporate charter.
with that said, many corporations do have provisions in their charters about maximizing returns for shareholders, among other provisions. but not every corporation does, and many have competing provisions in their charters.
particularly over the past ~30 years, an extensive theory of finance has been developed to argue that maximizing profit is the highest and best use of a corporation, but i'm very skeptical of that claim. german corporations for example are designed to consider all three of its constituents: employees, customers and shareholders.
so while i don't disagree with all of your claims about bureaucracies, i'd argue that facebook doesn't have to be turned over to the government to realize the benefits you claim.
The only country that could feasibly nationalize Facebook is the US (because of it's location), and the word "nationalization" in the US is associated with the drivers for a 35 year cold war. So, how would this work?
It could be controlled by an organization like the United Nations or even under control of the UN itself.
If Facebook were a separate intergovernmental organization then, similar to the UN, it could draft a general charter while each member state would control regional provisions. Facebook could remain a publicly traded entity, except shareholders would have limited power.
Another advantage is that it wouldn't need to be nationalized by any one country and whether the CEO/Secretary-General was an American or rotated like the UN wouldn't matter much because their power would also be limited.
If it's going to be controlled by the U.N. why leave its asset value in the hands of shareholders? Why not take away the existing shares from the shareholders, split the shares (roughly 2.5x per) and give every person on the planet one share. And then see what happens. Maybe people vote to turn over control to the U.N. or some other organization. Maybe they just sell their 1 share.
This is not advocacy, it's mental gymnastics. If you're going to say take away control from shareholders and invest it in some other body; it's hardly more controversial to also take away the asset value from (existing) shareholders also. If you only take away the control portion, the share price is going to implode anyway.
I agree that in a perfectly egalitarian existence that would be an ideal.
More pragmatically, in the world in which we live, under what precedent could such a thing happen? Facebook has a market cap of $350B right now and the controlling interest is held privately. The U.S. is founded on strong property rights and historically nationalization has been used under very dire circumstances.
Why should Facebook be nationalized though? Why shouldn't the government make its own social network if they want to? The answer is of course nobody would use it.
I hope (but don't unrealistically expect) that Musk can keep his micro-satellite network free of undue influence by any particular national government or set thereof.
What we need are some new and independent physical layers.
And if we're smart, the "smart people" will keep them to themselves for as long as possible. (Something Musk's network won't be able to help with.)
I miss the inquiring, helpful Net of increasing yore. Enough other people do, too, that I haven't given up hope it may find a home somewhere.
> I miss the inquiring, helpful Net of increasing yore. Enough other people do, too, that I haven't given up hope it may find a home somewhere.
Not sure how old you are, but I used to use 300 baud modems. I was pre-internet. I remember then 1997 on irc, then when the masses really woke up to the Internet around 1999-2001.
Anyway, people around that time really had hope for the internet.
Nowadays, well millennials just don't seem to have the same feeling. I figure they are in their bubbles happy to have whatever sandbox they are in keep the status quo and everything else, as long as their wants and needs are met, doesn't matter.
Give it a generation or two and we'll be just like Wall-E. Drones on basic income, with smartphones incorporated to our brains with all the corporations telling us how to live, work and think.
Seriously, this dystopia is not that far away. Just a few key ingredients for this to happen.
I trace the death of the Web I loved to around 2007-2010. That's about when it seemed like it stopped getting better and started getting worse.
- Google seemed to give up the spam war and start just returning only major sites for the top of most results around that time.
- Youtube started to become a way to make money, which was the beginning of the end for it. Google advertising IIRC started to get big on it around that time, too.
- Facebook started to expand beyond college networks and the recently-graduated to grandma and grandpa.
- Google generally started to Be Evil in a real way, fairly consistently.
- Amazon started to get all crapped-up with 3rd party retailers and print-on-demand garbage infecting even their book results, making it worse overall.
The main difference now is that instead of sorting through some small-time spam and ad-junk material to find the good stuff, the whole damn thing, practically, is spam and ad-junk. Local news sites look like click farm ad spam sites from the early 2000s. Ads in google results. Wading through disguised and explicit advertising and self-promotion on Youtube to find anything good. "1 weird trick!" on once-respectable sites. "Buy my (shitty) ebook to learn my secrets!" everywhere. We didn't beat spam—it ate the Web. It is the Web. The weird-but-good still exists but is harder to find. The Web kinda sucks now, unless you like advertising.
I'm pessimistic about it ever getting better. Maybe some new frontier will follow it, and that'll be OK for 1-2 decades before it gets ruined, too.
>> We didn't beat spam—it ate the Web. It is the Web.
That hits the mark for me. It feels as though the entire web is one big advertisement for stuff you don't need. It's made people apathetic. They don't even see it though it enters their subconsciouses.
IM-ing (in its then form) with "Sleepy" in the Netherlands (me in the U.S.) in 1987. Locally in a development environment in oh, '82, '83.
Sneakernetting SEDIT from an employer, a state over to campus tech support, who welcomed it.
Due to my circumstances, I missed most of the BBS phenomenon. But I experienced plenty of "we're in this together" in other venues.
Early Google was magical. Quality, helpful pages and sites at the top of the results.
"Early" Web bulletin boards had "real", de facto (by the general capabilities and sophistication of the time), often helpful anonymity (including for "survivors" of various sorts), and focus all too often missing from today's milieu.
Now -- trying not to sound elitist, but rather just particular -- the noise and banality washes out the quality that was once much more evident and prominent.
The extant Net is lost to the general population and the organizations that seek to control it and exploit it. Fine, for what that is, I guess -- today's television.
But not what I want.
And, free and cooperative communication (even in and supporting lively but intelligent and informative dispute) I also find to be essential to a functioning society. And to those who really move that society forward -- technically and otherwise.
The increasingly gated, panopticon fiber and IP address internet is less and less suited to serving this.
Nowadays, well millennials just don't seem to have the same feeling. I figure they are in their bubbles happy to have whatever sandbox they are in keep the status quo and everything else
Also, they think it's right and good that they bully, shout-down, and ban whatever they don't like. After all, it's the way of the online forums, and all that stuff is progressive and advanced, right?
This is so ironic to me. Last time I was on his forum I said something critical of google (this was when the snowden stuff was still in the news more) and he was super defensive, according to him google did and could do now wrong blah blah.
Ill bet he hasn't changed his mind about that either even though google is arguably even more dangerous to privacy/freedom of speech and the open web.
"Facebook everywhere -- Facebook is already on our phones and computers, pestering us with notifications"
One thing that iOS got right from the very beginning is granular, a la carte permissions. While I have Fb installed, it has almost no access -- no gps, no contacts, no notifications. It cannot intrude, I need to consciously start the app to see anything Fb-related. Same with Messenger.
I've recently removed Fb's media access (called "Photos" on iOS) because I noticed it was doing collages of the photos I took previously during the day -- I would like to think they are not uploading any data from my gallery to their servers, but would not put it past them.
Also, the mobile web version is usable, I think they purposefully hold it back to push people to the app, but you can get by. Because I'm not sure if they're scanning my gallery and extracting/communicating metadata back to their C2, I now do picture uploads thru mobile web, that way they do not have permanent access to my media. Would be nice for this to be an app permission, one-time and/or user action-initiated access vs the current permanent access, which includes unrestricted background access.
Another permissions to disable is "Background App Refresh," which if you have notifications disabled there should be no reason to have enabled. They can send a C2 ping which has IP information and who knows what other device profiling which, even with GPS disabled, can still probably give them a lot of information on your whereabouts. Unfortunately, on iOS, the main Fb app is implemented in a tricky way and does not even list itself in the main app permissions list, you need to find some of the permissions individually, and BG App Refresh does not appear to be defeatable. The Messenger app does list itself normally and can have all the perms turned off in one place.
I think the writer is mixing up cause and consequence.
The internet != Facebook
Although for many people internet == Facebook
But that is because for many people Facebook is what they want the internet to be. If people wanted internet to be something else, Facebook would be something else.
The essence of being successful is to give people what they want.
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump are examples of people who understand very, very well what the masses want. Without loosing focus on their own needs ;-)
Facebook didn't make or launch a satellite. Spacecom owned the satellite, Israeli Aerospace Industries made it. Facebook leased capacity on it. Just fyi.
I'm at the age that all my friends are having kids so I stay off Facebook.
Really it's only good for checking in on people every now and then, most of the stuff on my timeline is now spam. I know a lot of people feel the same way.
I wouldn't be surprised if the actual engagement on Facebook is a lot lower than we're led to believe.
what caused me to engage with Facebook a lot less often is the fact that if I post on some article, it shares it on my friends timelines. That "(friend) has commented on ..." stuff. I don't want that. I have a very diverse group of friends, and no, i don't want it being shared that i posted on a pro-gay or pro-clinton or pro-trump article. it's sharing unnecessarily.
It's literally just a website and no one is forcing anyone to use it. It's only as interesting as a person's friends are. The more censorship they implement the less interesting things will be said due to overt or self censorship. If it becomes less interesting people will spend less time there.
I think in a "normal" situation a government could fund programs that will help citizens understand how to deal with this relatively new phenomenon (ubiquity of fake news). The problem is approximately 50% of the US doesn't trust its government, and they also don't trust "elite" groups to teach them anything.
The lower class (and quasi-illiterate) citizens of this country (US, and probably many other countries) are becoming empowered and vocal members of society at such a rapid pace it is eclipsing our ability as a society to prepare them in such a way that the rest of us can trust that they will take this responsibility seriously.
Mostly agreed, but Id argue the problen is much much bigger. when they said ww3 would be fought over idealogy, i dont think anyone considered it wouldn't be nation states fighting, but corporate vs public interests.
Tbh, even as someone who is pretty concerned about big corporations, I'm not too fazed by Facebook. As someone who doesn't use it but still manages to have a good (social) life, I know Facebook doesn't provide anything people actually need. If Zuck ever does anything that the general public really cares about and despises, Facebook will lose its users way faster than most people would think.
I used uBlock Origin to block side panel to find out that every time I refresh the page ID of blocked elements changes and those side panel come back.
I rely on Feedly to get news and I hope it will not turn up into another Facebook. Even Feedly has it's own lock in as it does not allow us to export read later articles. For long time export option for OPML of subscribed RSS was not available too.
Someone needs to create a let's encrypt of facebook and twitter. Just an API to facilitate social networking. Everything automated. Everything in a user controlled silo to share with whatever app they want. That's right there a multi-billion dollar industry you can bring down over night with probably a few million dollars in investment. Google should do it as a strategic move. Embrace the open internet.
It's not just Facebook. All current hyper-centralized platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc) slowly screw up the Web in many subtle ways. The biggest one is that they are designed around consumption and production of content at the detriment of everything else. (Everything else being analysis, discussions, asking questions, learning and even making new social contacts.)
The current web has a toleration and free speech problem. When only a minority of researchers, professionals, and students were online, there was enough of an online culture of intellectualism and respect (though it still got pretty wooly even in the 80's) that things still kinda worked.
Generations of internet f#cwads, forums with deletions, and heavy-handed moderation has taught the general populace that the other side is stupid, ugly, and deplorable, and that only moderation mechanisms and the shouting of the crowd prevail. Things have gone from the internet as a repository of knowledge, to an unstoppable font of clickbait and fake news.
It's true. We can't have nice things. We, being human beings without social pressures to keep us in check.
I'm posting my comment I made for the original article.
There should be a law stating that a service like Facebook which thrives on public data, should expose all of their data once they reach a critical mass like 10 Million people. Exposing may or may not be without people's consent, but getting the consent of users should not be a problem. This will make sure that a competitor or alternate entity can bootstrap their service with this data. You don't need to stay in facebook to stay in touch with your family. You can stay in your own service and you still will be able to communicate with people on facebook and similar other services.
This will give a level playing field and stop having monopolies of corporations which thrive on user behavioral data.
This idea was suggested by someone in a different form in a similar discussion here in HN, and I think it is terrific and it will solve most of the problems.
It is not even necessary to have the law act when reaching a 10M critical mass. If some service calls itself a social network or related service, then they are bound to submit the data collected by them which is owned by the content user and not the service. Sure, they can operate by declaring themselves not as an social service, but by the time people realizes then there should be a penalty and immediate surrendering of past collected data.
There are few concerns though IF this comes to fruition.
Security:
Right Now, all the FB related stuff are secured by some of the bright minds hired by Facebook. They have the financial muscle to protect the data they collect, even though that money might have flowed some unscrupulous advertising and tracking stuffs.
If all the user behavioural data ends up in a central entity/repository, then there should be some neutral agency like UN handling all this data. But on the other hand, hiring highly technical people to safeguard this public information might not be possible financially and logistically. For example, Facebook has its own personal interests to secure the user related data. A common entity might not do as efficiently as it should, and even a small leak will lead to catatostrophic results with all the user information across different services laid bare.
Accessibility:
If all the user information shared across the internet ends up in a single place, then ownership and accessiblity of that data should be more refined and robust. I should have the ability to choose to whom I can share all that information irrespective of where I posted the content. People should be able to grant access to all of their data to be used by people like Facebook, even though the content was originally posted in facebook.
Of course, there is Facebook in between if we have to realize anything remotely like this.
Yes, it will. In fact, it may be the only thing that will help.
Facebook has shown willingness to make unpopular changes if it can get away with it--and it always gets away with it. The fact that an informed and visible critic like the author can't even manage to give it up is a case study in why Facebook can and will keep calling bluffs. Complaints mean nothing if you are giving the site the same eyeball time. Facebook's success is due to the size of its social network. The network effect works both ways, though; if enough people leave then those remaining will have less incentive to stay on board, and the network will unravel inversely to how it was built. Only when the eyeball count starts declining will Facebook take users' wishes seriously.