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Comment by pettazz | Hacker News Reader

This is like saying you should be a citizen of more than one country, so in case you do something illegal in one, you can always flee to another.

Why don't you just not break the ToS?

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Because the ToS are infantilizing, designed to water-down human interactions for maximum advertiser-friendliness?

How are they infantilizing? I've never had a problem with anyone's ToS. They don't allow nudity, don't post nudity. It's really not that hard not to break them unless they have arbitrary bullshit rules like "YOU CAN'T SAY APPLE ON WEDNESDAY" or if, like Facebook, all your data is their property.

Does the ToS let me communicate as if I were in a room full of adults and friends? Or does it require me to behave like I was visiting a grade-school classroom?

You're comparing becoming a citizen in a foreign country to signing up with a social network? There are a hell of a lot more barriers to becoming a foreign citizen, such as physical location, than signing up for a social network and giving it all your personal data.

Google is a much bigger data-collecting, privacy-breaching behemoth than Facebook, so signing up with them should be an action that warrants thought.

It was a metaphor. I wasn't exactly saying that it was exactly the same. And yeah, it does warrant thought, but the whole point of this article is that when one site owns all your web apps, if you piss them off, you lose access to all of those at once. I'm wondering why people don't just not dick around. I've never gotten kicked/banned from anything by accident. Just don't post a picture of your ass on G+ and your docs will be fine.

Maybe this is true for US cit's. But if you think a bit more out of the box than just "States", the author has quite a point. Just look at what some gov'ts in less well of countries with regard to FoS now are doing in terms of monitoring People by "spying on" social networks. I think if you take the WWW (where world != only US), the issues the author raises do matter, and quite a lot. It might be much easier to reach a "state" where you get locked out of all your "eggs".

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