When referring to personal integrity, I’m talking about not being complacent and just automatically accepting each change as minor and thus ok. I referred to the “boiling frog” anecdote in a blog post recently with regards to Facebook:

http://www.purecaffeine.com/2010/04/evolving-technology-and-the-boiling-frog/

At some point we have to say enough is enough. If I were new to Facebook right now, today, I probably would still sign up for the service. But I don’t use Facebook like I use Twitter in part because of the different privacy models. I use Facebook differently because at one time it was private. Now, not so much. I’m being undermined. Slowly. And I’m not comfortable with that.

As I tweeted this morning: “People who are defending Facebook remind me of the Homer and spit pig Simpsons episode: ‘It’s still good, it’s still good!’”.

This is the big conflict: we need community powered personalization to filter information but we also need privacy. It is possible that p2p, where no data is stored/controlled centrally and is encrypted on the wire, is the only way to do this.

FAROO has been working on this for many years and have now proved that it is possible: our p2p search network has 1.7 million peers with search latency below 1 second.

You mentioned two questions around p2p. These are things we have been thinking about for a long time.

“I am all in favor of people building what they believe to be alternatives to Facebook. I even invested in Diaspora because I’m curious what will come of that system. But I don’t believe that Diaspora is a Facebook killer. I do believe that there is a potential for Diaspora to do something interesting that will play a different role in the ecosystem and I look forward to seeing what they develop. I’m also curious about the future of peer-to-peer systems in light of the move towards the cloud, but I’m not convinced that decentralization is a panacea to all of our contemporary woes. Realistically, I don’t think that most users around the globe will find a peer-to-peer solution worth the hassle. The cost/benefit analysis isn’t in their favor. ”

The download hurdle is a common reservation. It has not proved a hurdle when the payoff is big enough – think Skype and Spotify. And more recently the iPhone and Android app stores have totally changed the mindset around downloading software. The key issue I think is what you mention – “hassle”. It is a hassle free experience on iPhone but people have found the experience less than hassle-free on the PC. That is why Diaspora may find the technical challenges harder than they think. Making p2p totally scalable, reliable and hassle free is not simple.

“I’m also patently afraid that a system like Diaspora will be quickly leveraged for child pornography and other more problematic uses that tend to emerge when there isn’t a centralized control system.”

In Diaspora each user places their profile on their own server, so they will held responsible anyway. If people would like to store illegal things on a server they can do it all the time, they don’t need Diaspora for this. FAROO only indexes information that is already publicly available. If something is bad, you can remove the original page, than it will disappear from the p2p system, automatically.

Recently Google offered https encrypted search for more privacy:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/search-more-securely-with-encrypted.html

While Google’s https search eliminates wiretapping by intermediate parties, but they still collect log files.

HTTPS does not protect against a leak of those log files by technical problems, human error, later changes of terms of services, criminal data theft, legal challenges, or silent cooperation with interested authorities.

Google still collects personal data, but offers privacy by policy (which can be changed or challenged). The same is true of Facebook clearly!

FAROO in turn does not collect personal data at all, and offers privacy by architectural design (attention data for ranking are anonymized /search queries stay encrypted all the time, because the index is encrypted itself / there is no central data repository which could be wiretapped).

Also, I hardly believe a social diversion, can hardly compare with a dwelling with which there is a legally binding contract, ie the unhappy tenant.

I doubt that’s why people are looking for a designated Quit day though. I think a lot of people have been tired of Facebook for a while, for a whole bunch of reasons, but they’ve been nervous about leaving because Facebook’s ubiquity implies a potential for ostracism for those that don’t participate. Privacy is a neat, universal concern that attracts enough interest to mobilize a Quit Day. Suddenly a lot of people have not only a defensible excuse for leaving but a community of fellow quitters to ease the separation.

And for this reason I disagree there’s any point challenging Facebook to do better, over Privacy at least. The dissatisfaction is more complex than that, perhaps even going back to a “fake sense of intimacy .. both misleading and dreadfully disappointing” that you so cleverly predicted in your News Feed blog, and this will not be fully understood by the people who choose to remain.

If sweet little old ladies abandon their accounts because they feel a bit ick about posting pictures of their grandchildren there’s nobody on Facebook who can challenge Facebook about this. People without grandchildren don’t really care. The digerati don’t really care. The sweet little old ladies themselves probably don’t care. The only people who care are the ones who have something to sell to sweet little old ladies. And they happen to be the only ones with any real power to effect change in this environment.

If you want change, enlist the advertisers. Get them to step up now and say “Oi Facebook, you idiots! Quit freaking out my customers or I’ll take my advertising budget elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, if anyone would like to sell me some educational toys, you’ll find me on MySpace where there is a photo of me and my grandchild that’s still protected by the same privacy setting I applied in 2006.

http://www.esarcasm.com/14671/breaking-facebook%E2%80%99s-mark-zuckerberg-responds-to-privacy-concerns-the-first-draft/

keep up the good work, danah.

dt