While that can be a big ask for many services, we're also doing a great job of replicating the functionality of many closed services in an open way. As long as the FOSS/hobby tech world still cares, we'll keep biting away at the new markets closed services create.
I think nibbling away is more accurate. There are still no privacy-conscious alternatives to the big 3 social networks (Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn) and none on the horizon. Yes technological alternatives exist, but not practical ones as I'm not likely to run into someone using Diaspora in real life.
This is similar to GNU/Linux vs. Windows on desktop where Linux gained a little bit of market share but was never a real alternative when it mattered. That defeat is all the worse in retrospect as Windows 10 is now a great vector of privacy invasion for Microsoft.
From a social justice POV, "just don't use the service" may be practical for those with a lot of education and opportunities for employment, but is a non-starter for someone who needs LinkedIn to find work or whose landlord expects to snoop through their Facebook account. We need a solution that helps everyone, not just those with the know-how and economic freedom to use niche alternatives.
I'm not a member of LinkedIn so I'm constantly a bit confused by it. Does it offer anything compelling besides a list of the places you've worked and studied? Why couldn't I get the same benefit by putting up a static web page with a content form? Am I missing out on something?
(Stack Overflow Careers is another good spot if you're interested, with in my experience a lower incoming message rate but a somewhat higher average lead quality, and none of the irritation that LinkedIn generally creates in its users.)
The same question could have been asked of GeoCities and one could give the same answer: most people outside the tech bubble don't know and don't want to know how to put up a website.
Yes, it's "not that hard", but it's also not as easy as filling in a bunch of text fields on LinkedIn - especially when you factor in things like SEO if you have a common name.
Me, I find it theoretical, due to its profligate handling of email addressbooks and my history helping maintain mailing lists and selling items on Craigslist before they implemented full bidirectional address anonymization. I've had a large number of invitations, likely autosent, to connect from folks I wouldn't recognize if they sat down in front of me.
Other problems:
* Services you use indirectly.
* Services your employer uses and reires you to use.
* Services a government service requires use of.
As technological tools become part of the social, corporate, governmental, and institutional infrastructure, "opting out" becomes an increasingly less viable, and more punishing, alternative.
Too: you're denying the specific tools which directly address the situation. Legal and technical means to loudly and clearly state "no", or to sue for damages where this isn't possible.
For example, when all your friends now communicate mainly on Facebook (or WhatsApp, etc.), then your choice is to either lose touch with your friends, or use that service. Sure, nobody's technically forcing you to use Facebook, but the social externality means that you become cut off from your friends in a very real way if you don't.
And when will it be useful? The scariest thing is when all this data will be used by smart algorithms designed to construct plausible stories in a court of law about you, making anyone a target for legal threats and jailtime and intimidation. It's already the case in more totalitarian countries, but this is about free countries where juries of peers and other systems will be subverted with clever algorithms and a mountain of data to use.
All your blockchain and anonymous transactions are stored until such time as you slip up and get deanonymized.
All you are currently relying on -- all that our legal systems are relying on -- is inefficiency of the attacker. You think they can't cross reference enough materials, analyze them deep enough, at a large enough scale, fast enough, and can't put two and two together. But the growing repository of data is there to be (quantum-cracked and) mined for information.
Ask yourself this: what would it take for a determined attacker to ruin your reputation or credit today using only the techniques in the NSA field manual? https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
Politically, this framework is at the root of the problem. Currently, privacy violation is only policed based on method of access, rather than a larger general concept. We put "hackers" in prison for years for "breaking into an email account" because they shared a few people's private information, yet commercial surveillance bureaus are free to do whatever they want because the data is already "out there". Focusing solely on access kills any independent concept of privacy.
Specifying what exactly should be considered wrong is obviously a challenge. I think a business entity having someone's identifying information in a database without an ongoing business relationship could be a decent first pass. This difficulty is a large part of what has stunted progress. (Just FWIW my usual assumption is that information dissemination can't be stopped, but I don't think that assumption is necessarily true when talking about policing commercial entities that inherently have government charters.)
I'm actually more hopeful for technical solutions to the problem, even though they suffer from problems of scope, implementation, financing, and adoption. But coming up with a better external concept of privacy can guide such things too, especially encouraging incremental change in business models as opposed to the moon shot of repaving it all with Free software.
An alternative model for funding both innovative reasearch and creative content (writing, music, film/video, visual, and other arts) also seems increasingly essential. Information and culture are public goods, and cash-on-the-barrelhead (or bitcoin-through-the-anonymised-exchange) transactions are largely not appropriate for them.
I am very much hoping this all dies in a fire. I'm increasingly concerned as to just how all-encompassing that fire may turn out to be.