Diaspora, or Bees Against Honey
(Crossposted here)
I don’t get all this buzz. If setting it up is any harder than typing a website address in your browser, the casual user just isn’t going to bother, and it’s going to remain a “geeky thing” like the GPG web of trust.
In the end, I think the Facebook privacy scandals miss the point, and deal with the symptom rather than the disease. Social Media® (tm) are designed for people who don’t care about privacy—because if you cared about your privacy, you wouldn’t spend your day documenting your life in minute detail 140-character messages. Pitching privacy controls to Facebook’s target audience is like trying to sell clothes to nudists. If you don’t want your private information to be public knowledge, there’s only one real solution: don’t post it on the Internet.
Eh, first of all, the end user doesn’t run diaspora. It’s essentially cloning what facebook runs on its own servers. The end users would end up accessing it by simply typing a website address in a browser.
Also, it’s possible to have an online presence and still care about your privacy. You might have a set of pictures you want X group of friends to be able to see, but you don’t want strangers or potential employers to see it. I mean, surely someone could print it out and physically bypass the security, but barring that unlikely sequence of events, you should feel confident in the security restrictions from a technical standpoint.
But that’s not what we’re getting. We’re getting overly complex, hard to understand policies that change at the whim of a group that obviously doesn’t care about your privacy.
You’re right that people don’t seem to care, but I don’t think that it’s because they’re trying to throw it away. They’re simply ignorant.