Sure Marky Mark still sees when you post, who you send messages to, etc. but it's a much better situation than what's going on now. Plus it would probably put a dent in their bottom line, and so send them the message that privacy matters to people.
Sure Marky Mark still sees when you post, who you send messages to, etc. but it's a much better situation than what's going on now. Plus it would probably put a dent in their bottom line, and so send them the message that privacy matters to people.
We could might be able to help. Even just with small things like design analisys and testing.
Unless ofc you're just building this for yourself and your friends, which is something I thought about doing myself but then realized that even my friends cba to install yet another chat app.
That's the same reason Facebook would never beat MySpace and MySpace would lose out to Friendster.
Metcalf's Law and initial traction are real challenges to achieving critical mass of users, but it has been done. I'm biased to hope for @ghughes success and that enough people care about privacy to give it or similar services a shot.
Zuck can't add any encrypted content to your personal profile, which means he doesn't make any money off you. And Zuck can do pretty much whatever he wants in his castle, I'd say.
> the trick is to do it in a way that doesn't require a PhD in computers to operate the damn thing, as was the issue with previous attempts
This sounds similar to the story of PGP. Many attempts have been made to get people to use it, but it just didn't catch on (on a big scale). So I'm curious: how will it be different this time?
can we get in touch somehow ? too bad hn doesn't allow private messages.
When you post, the content is sent as an encrypted message that can only be decrypted by people who should be able to see it (either all of your friends or just a subset of them). The client automatically takes care of key management and is responsible for keeping track of sent & received posts, comments, etc; it renders a news-feed-like UI on top of that data. The end result is a familiar UX on the surface, but the underlying mechanism for transmitting data between users is far more secure than the traditional approach of using a monolithic database that contains everyone's data in plaintext.
> If things are encrypted, how are you going to determine relevance, etc.
The client is solely responsible for that. For now the "news feed" is strictly chronological, but I plan to augment it later by prioritizing posts that might be particularly interesting to the user. There are plenty of ways to make those decisions locally.
Look at how fast AdNauseam got the boot from google to get an idea.
It is simply necessary to have the plain-text in a publically known format, e.g. prepended with date or name or whatever. Then you post the cypher-text to your "timeline" (or whatever it's called) and try decrypting all your friends' posts to find which one is meant for you.
To get around Fb-imposed usage restrictions use a steganography or obfuscation tool. https://seecret.io is already linked to somewhere on this thread.
What channel would you use to share the keys on FB? The Facebook API simply will not let you do that anymore. Direct messages have a character limit and you can't just post to someone's wall anymore.
I tried working on something like this for seecret.io but was confounded by the Facebook API's limitations.
Twitter is much better for that. Probably other network too.