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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

Is there any feasible way to actually have the good parts of Facebook but prevent all of the data mining especially by third parties. I can't actually think of a way. Is there some subset of acceptable data to share? Is Facebook as it is right now totally broken and a new model needed?

The use cases of automatically adding your friends pictures and birthdays to matching phone contacts was awesome when I first used it in college. Games like Words with Friends are a lot more fun when I'm actually playing with people I know. Not everyone discovers and plays games at the same time so its nice seeing when someone new starts playing and also knowing not to pester friends that stopped playing long ago.

Being connected with actual people I know is nice, I just hope it doesn't all have to go away because there are so many people out there trying to abuse the data.

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I don't like that my data is exploited to target ads. But I also wouldn't like it if Facebook charged 25 cents per friend request, or threatened to cut me off from my social groups if I didn't pay the monthly fee. Similar problems apply to Facebook's platform standards and data handling.

I don't mean to claim that Facebook's done nothing wrong. But ultimately, there are uncomfortable tradeoffs involved in friendship-as-a-service. Expecting an completely non-creepy version of Facebook is like expecting a completely non-controversial version of government.

Other than the obviously extremely-difficult-to-overcome network effects, I don't think it'd be impossible to create something decentralized that replicated much of the core functionality of Facebook, ie syndicating news, pictures, etc about people you care about, and providing some basic ability to have conversation threads. There'd obviously be some tradeoffs, but I don't think any of them would necessarily be mortal blows to the UX.

But it seems like decentralization would be a mortal blow to privacy. If we struggle to get a monolithic Facebook to treat our data responsibly, how could we possibly convince 500 decentralized Facebook nodes? (And why isn't it trivial for the NSA or FSB to copy the world's data by standing up node #238 under an alias?)

Decentralised as in "run your own for your family and any friends who do not want to run their own", not as in "run the node for this geographical area". As long as the management boundaries coincide with the privacy boundaries - i.e. data within nodes belongs to a group of people who already share said data since they are in the same family or friend group - the scenario you picture here would not come to pass.

Of course there are several attempts at building a decentralised 'social' network like this, e.g. Diaspora and GNU Social. Thus far they have not taken off other than in limited circles.

>Expecting am completely non-creepy version of Facebook is like expecting a completely non-controversial version of the government.

Strange comparison. We should remember that the difference between a government and a company is who owns them. Governments are owned by the people, and many times throughout history, it became obvious to the population that they could not trust a private company to manage their fancy new communication network. And so, they had their government do it, so that they would have a say. That’s what democracy is all about.

They aren’t new problems. Facebook provides communication, not friendship. The friend component is just a network address book of sorts, effectively no different from a phone number. If the phone company were allowed to replace phone numbers with references to a centralized lookup table, they would certainly do it. But it’s illegal, thanks to over a century full of public outcry and contentions just like these.

Here's something that solves half the problem (securely using FB from a browser): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/facebookcontainer/

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