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Comment by politician | Hacker News Reader

My hope is that people have simply tired of the concept. The privacy implications are staggering.

I don't see anything wrong with a general social network that supports sharing information with people you know. Regardless of how far people have stretched and abused the concept of "people you know" (and "information"), the infrastructure seems useful. So I don't want to see social networking go away; I want to see it entirely decentralized, such that each person's social network goes through that person's personal site.

By their very nature, centralized social networking sites like Facebook force you to share information not only with the people you know, but also with the owners of site.

Some people don't mind this, but I for one don't want Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site knowing who my friend are or what I'm sharing with them. It's simply none of their business.

The only hope I see for a truly privacy-respecting social network is a distributed, peer-to-peer network. That way you'd be communicating only with those you know, at least in principle.

But even there there are major problems, such as the need for information to travel over untrusted hops to get to its destination. Encryption can help with some of it, but would still be subject to traffic analysis. Maybe a social network could be created over TOR. I don't know.

Encrypted, peer-to-peer social networks are prohibitively difficult. More likely, we'll see node-to-node social networks first.

There is a social network called Sone on top of Freenet http://new-wiki.freenetproject.org/Sone

Still experimental though.

I think FB has another 2-3yrs before a newcomer comes along. FB will eventually be the 'old' site and uncool to be there. Speaking of privacy, there's a huge privacy hole on the site right now. Currently if I request to add certain people, their data feed starts to populate my wall before they've even accepted the friend request. I think it's because they're part of a group or network I'm already in.

Facebook pulls in anything a user you've requested to be a friend of shares publicly. It's not because you're part of a group, it's because of the privacy settings on their status updates.

Ahhhh. That explains it. Thanks.

How many Facebook users care about privacy? I agree that there are considerable issues with regard to Facebook and privacy, but I'm not sure that most of their users are proactive in caring about it as much.

It is probably more likely that people are tired of Facebook, and aren't using it as much.

That's my point -- we know that people aren't proactive about their privacy, yet we also know that there are "considerable issues with regard to Facebook and privacy." So what can we do but hope that the fickleness of public interest eventually steers the culture away from this danger?

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