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Comment by orbifold | Hacker News Reader

If a business model is not viable without mass surveillance and unprecedented amount of privacy invasion, maybe one should try to come up with better alternatives. Luckily Facebook is already being unbundled and I'm sure with changing technology the need for a centralized hub for social interaction over the internet will fade away. One way could be via the development of new protocols, like an improvement of Email, that could be implemented by many different servers and clients. Another the advent of IPv6 and the fact that it makes p2p protocols more viable.

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99.9% of people dont care about all that. They want an easy way to connect with friends/family and even strangers. They dont want to pay for it though so they're willing to be served ads. The model works just fine.

And I keep hearing this all the time, if there are better alternatives than what are they? Facebook has thousands of employees, most just like you and me. They are not an army of evil people planning destruction, they're just optimizing their platform to better serve ads for both their advertisers AND the users. That's it. Where is this "privacy invasion"? What are they taking from you without your consent?

> "What are they taking from you without your consent?"

Most people don't understand the privacy settings nor do they comprehend the ToS (because the reading-skill level required is too high). So what does 'consent' actually mean in this context?

I feel you're being completely disingenuous in your comments here, so I guess you'd probably just blame the user for not educating themselves.

Consent = posting something publicly means it's public. It's the same as if you spoke aloud in a room, the people around you can hear it. Facebook is just a bigger room, but comes with privacy controls if you're interested. Nobody is stealing your thoughts and filling out your profile, it's all done willingly.

I don't use facebook and I block their social media buttons. I have less control over friends of mine posting pictures of me on facebook or the fact that facebook is able to read SMS send to peoples phones that have their App installed.

I'm fully aware that people don't care about privacy and abusive corporate practices, which is why it falls on the shoulders of the few that do care to come up with compelling alternatives, that respect users privacy. As you mention those alternatives would probably not be profitable (because you can't rely on ads). If they came in the form of new protocols (just like Email or SMS) and free software to implement those protocols it wouldn't matter as much.

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