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Comment by bigphishy | Hacker News Reader

In addition to meaningful communications between you and family/friends, the communication is only between you and you friends. On facebook, the communication is through you --> third party corporation --> family/friends.

There's something to be said about not directly involving corporations with your communications.

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Why use the internet at all then? After all I can 'prove' that real world interactions have far more informational content than virtualized ones, so all non-utilitarian electronic communication is inherently inferior if you begin with that premise.

The internet? Well for example there are many internet services that I do use, for example p2p sharing, decentralized and open source services. There's nothing inherent that says a major social networking site needs to be a multi-billion dollar corporation, in fact that goes against the foundation of decentralization that the internet was built upon.

What I'm trying to say is, the internet is great, with it we can move beyond the old hegemony and monopolies.

The postman, local mail company, phone line company, Microsoft (Skype).

Unless you talk to them face to face, most, if not all, forms of communication rely on third parties.

The postman doesn't read your mail. (Normally, of course. I'm sure it's happened).

Sure it happened somewhat. That's how they caught Solzhenitsyn and that's the protagonist's side job in Catch 22.

But we're talking orders of magnitude of difference.

In general "they" don't read your mail because they can't even if they wanted to. Slow mail is extremely expensive to do a through survailence on.

That's kind of the point though. Even if they would read your mail if they could, they cannot because of the technological limitations on the medium.

The intention doesn't matter, the fact is that slow mail is private for all intents and purposes.

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