Re:Facebook alternatives spreadsheet
by gnosis on Saturday May 08, 2010 @11:09PM
(#1331448)
Lack of privacy was the foremost reason I quit Facebook. But I'm not sure any of these alternatives are any better on that front.
It would be nice to have some sort of verifiable guarantees that these companies don't use, sell, share, or give away any of the information they collect from me and about me and my circle of friends.
It would be even better were they mathematically incapable of collecting any of this sort of information at all. I'm envisioning maybe some combination of Tor (or maybe anonymous remailers) and social networking, where not even the owners of the network know who's talking to whom and what they're saying (at least that's how it's supposed to work in theory).
The problem is that many of the value-added features that social networking sites provide rely on knowing something about the participants and who they're communicating with. And the more of this knowledge the site has, the more useful/fun services it can provide.
So it seems that social networking sites and real privacy/anonymity are diametrically opposed. So I'm not sure how useful a completely anonymous and private social networking site would be.
Still, no doubt there's lots of room for improvement from a complete privacy-invading site like Facebook. And some sort of happy medium might be reached where a site is much better than Facebook on many privacy-conscious fronts and yet not be completely anonymous and privacy-respecting in every conceivable way.
It would be nice to have some sort of verifiable guarantees that these companies don't use, sell, share, or give away any of the information they collect from me and about me and my circle of friends.
It would be even better were they mathematically incapable of collecting any of this sort of information at all. I'm envisioning maybe some combination of Tor (or maybe anonymous remailers) and social networking, where not even the owners of the network know who's talking to whom and what they're saying (at least that's how it's supposed to work in theory).
The problem is that many of the value-added features that social networking sites provide rely on knowing something about the participants and who they're communicating with. And the more of this knowledge the site has, the more useful/fun services it can provide.
So it seems that social networking sites and real privacy/anonymity are diametrically opposed. So I'm not sure how useful a completely anonymous and private social networking site would be.
Still, no doubt there's lots of room for improvement from a complete privacy-invading site like Facebook. And some sort of happy medium might be reached where a site is much better than Facebook on many privacy-conscious fronts and yet not be completely anonymous and privacy-respecting in every conceivable way.