Rise of the Facebook-Killers

From The Village Voice comes an interesting view of Facebook and social networks in general.  The piece is based around a speech give by Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School and the founder of Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School and the founder of Software Freedom Law Center in which the professor focused on the negative aspects of the current social networks, namely Facebook that infringe upon privacy rights.

It is rather disturbing how much people freely give up there information on these social media sites.  Like anything there are pros and cons.  I readily admit that I am a user of social networks including Fcaebook and use these social platforms as a source to promote posts just like this and the DWCM in general and the services we offer. I do limit the amount of personal data that I put out there about myself.  However I know of people that put much of their lives out there to share with family and friends which is great but who else has access to that data?  It's a balancing act, what to give up and share and won't to hold back.

Here are some points from the Village Voice piece

• "So, of course, I didn't have any date tonight," Moglen began, deadpan. "Everybody knows that. My calendar's on the Web. The problem is that problem. Our calendar is on the Web. Our location is on the Web. You have a cell phone, and you have a cell-phone-network provider, and if your cell-phone-network provider is Sprint, then we can tell you that several million times last year, somebody who has a law-enforcement ID card in his pocket somewhere went to the Sprint website and asked for the real-time location of somebody with a telephone number and was given it. Several million times. Just like that."
• "Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record," Moglen said of the founder of Facebook. "He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. Why? Because Mark Zuckerberg had harnessed the energy of our social desires to talk us into a swindle. "Everybody needs to get laid," Moglen said. "He turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality, and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, 'I will give you free Web hosting and some PHP doodads, and you get spying for free all the time.'"Why? Because Mark Zuckerberg had harnessed the energy of our social desires to talk us into a swindle. "Everybody needs to get laid," Moglen said. "He turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality, and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, 'I will give you free Web hosting and some PHP doodads, and you get spying for free all the time.'"
• "I'm not suggesting it should be illegal," Moglen told the audience of the Internet Society of New York. "It should be obsolete. We're technologists. We should fix it."Fixing it wouldn't be hard, Moglen argued. There's no reason the architecture of a social network has to include the kinds of privacy invasion endemic to Facebook. In fact, the hardware and software necessary to build a network in which people kept direct control of their information, with no middleman, already exists. So Moglen challenged his audience: Build a better system.

• What makes Facebook so valuable isn't the Web ads it serves up, but rather the unprecedented amount of information it has about its users, which it can then sell to third parties. Business intelligence—the data a company can scrape together about its customers—is the fastest-growing segment of enterprise computing. Major tech companies are snapping up companies that make business-intelligence software. But the software that does the data mining is only a tool—what really matters is how much data you have. And Facebook has a lot.
• "Privacy isn't an antiquated idea," Moglen says. "That's like saying fresh air over the Grand Canyon is antiquated when you own a copper smelter. We know it's wrong to invade people's privacy. We haven't gotten rid of the laws that say it's a crime to look in people's windows or steal their personal information."
• The problem, Moglen argues, is that Facebook's usurpation of privacy isn't an individual matter that single users can decide to make their peace with. It's ecological: What you share and what you click on affects what Facebook knows about your friends, too. And in the aggregate, all this personal information helps build a machine that can know the past and present and make good guesses about the future, a machine whose insights are incredibly valuable to everyone from corporations to state-intelligence services.
• "Free software moves more slowly because there isn't any money in it," Moglen says. "But that doesn't mean it doesn't eventually get there. Facebook can only give people what it's already given them. But in the future, they can have all of that, plus the privacy they'd like. It's true: People will give up freedom for convenience, but if you give them both, eventually, they choose the option with freedom."