I think it's absurdly unrealistic to expect people to do in-depth due diligence on all of the services they use. Modern society requires us to trust innumerable service providers and their dependencies to enable so much of the convenience we take for granted. What little knowledge we do have about abuse comes from the accountability of these companies to regulators like the FTC and FCC.

Realistically, I think we have three choices:

- We can't have nice things.

- Rampant exploitation of individuals, due to vast asymmetry of information.

- Regulation, with its costs and inefficiencies.

But I think there's very little precedent of real accountability deriving from collective consumer action, even in cases of overt abuse (think Wells Fargo).

I think another thing that bothers me about this mindset is that we have started viewing "consumer" action as the only valid response, which is really convenient for some people for the reasons you mention.

But in a society where citizens are represented by elected officials, regulations are "citizen" action. Regulations should not be viewed as any less legitimate than consumer action, they are just enacted through a proxy mechanism, aka elected officials.

This whole bifurcation of regulation vs consumer boycott, and the subsequent push to delegitimize regulation seems pretty artificial, and more importantly, a huge benefit to people looking to avoid any sort of boundaries on their actions.

I disagree completely, honestly. If you are signing up for a service like Facebook and they are asking you to click a bunch of boxes, it's not unrealistic to expect you to

a) either understand what you are clicking on or b) just refuse to click on it

what is unrealistic is to expect society to babysit you every single time a moderately complex choice is presented to you.

If you were to actually sit and read those agreements for everything you use, more than half of all productive time for humanity would be reading licensing agreements. You can refuse to click on these things,but these companies continue to try to insert themselves into more and more of society until we get to the point that you can either chose to spend all day confirming companies aren't taking advantage of you, or checking out of society.

This is a tragedy of the commons that government regulation has been the best solution for so far

But surely all the evidence suggests that it is unrealistic, given that reality shows us over and over that people don't read these boxes before checking?

Do you read the entirety of every twenty page EULA before using a new app?

Actually, I do(almost always). But, that leads to it's own set of issues. My banking session timed out before I finished reading it. Another service I've been using for over 10 years just added new legal that I don't agree to... now what? That service has a network effect... so, I have to leave? drat! Truth is, most online services ask for more than I am willing to concede. That is an issue.

Not to mention the services that alter their TOS and "notify" you by updating a web page. No email, no summary of changes, just a quiet update to a 20 page document that you automatically agree to by continuing to log in.

All sensible choices last only till antagnositc action occurs.

In the case of legal documents -

1) the base scenario itself is terrible - attempts to make credit card terms easier to read have resulted in a huge increase in the amount of text required to read it.

2) leaving the base case aside - the moment a company or individual decides that they can get away with preying on customers, sensible options no longer work- no normal person is going to beat the legal team.

Your position is a theoretically sound position but it does not survive contact with very common real world scenarios.

you have to evaluate this position in the context of comparing it to the alternatives. Do you propose government regulating every moderately complex activity because people can't understand it? First of all, people are smarter than you give them credit for and secondly, Soviet Union tried this. It just doesn't work.

The Soviet Union didn’t live in the modern era - and the country which is comparable today is China - and they’re doing very well. I’ve heard many credible claims that the Chinese state will fail, but it hasn’t till date.

So that point may need to be re-thought.

Doing what very well? You are making too handwavy of a statement. they are regulating some things they care about very heavily and others not at all. And very well is all relative. China is a poor country still, comparing it to US is not reasonable at this stage

> After all of this came out, FB use didn't really go down.

It's both too early and hard to say that for sure. I would suspect it's had an impact on FB's long term trend line, especially with younger people.

Anecdotally, much of my social network has significantly decreased their Facebook use if status updates are anything to go by. They may be on the site as much as before, but they're not really engaging with it as actively as they used to.

Granted, that could just be a normal fall-off since the 2016 Presidential Election season was a "special" time. But I've noticed even with my cousins abroad they've mostly transitioned fully to WhatsApp. Sure, that is also a Facebook joint, but it sends a real signal to Facebook as to what the market values in a social media platform, and it seems it's not the Facebook model.

> But I've noticed even with my cousins abroad they've mostly transitioned fully to WhatsApp.

I've managed to get my friends and family over to other channel so we are now almost 100% Facebook free except for a few log in with Facebook and the occasional Instagram (also declining I think).

(Disclaimer: I trust WhatsApps crypto since a number of cryptographers have audited it but I still do not want them to have my metadata. I mean, seriously: the crypto can be unbreakable but why do we think Facebook bought WhatsApp and made it free?)

I've been trying to do the same. Most of the communication has moved to WhatsApp and the "here's what's going on in my life" blasts have moved to Twitter and Instagram. It seems like people have reverted back to using plain old email (or Evite) for event invitations (thank God for the former ehhh on the latter).

The big impediment left has been Facebook's function as a social space to share photos with all and sundry. If not for it being the place to post photos of kids, weddings, vacations, etc. I don't think people would be spending much time on it. Seeing pictures of their nephews, nieces, kids, and grandkids on there is definitely what keeps the old people plugged in.

There really isn't another service that fills the niche either. Instagram is geared towards individual photos rather than albums or chronicles of events. Flickr kind of did, but it's basically dead now and its narrow focus on photography alone wound up gearing it towards pro or hobbyist photographers and didn't get much buy in from everyday users.

Facebook also seems to be something of a default space to host a bulletin board or community forum. Next-door has been trying to muscle in on that territory but it's been plagued by problems with racist usage patterns. Those would probably go away if it was more common, but it's created some real issues with optics. Also, I have no idea what their security practices are like so who knows if it's an improvement.

Google Photos isn't bad for making and sharing albums. But then again you're just trading one giant for another.