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Comment by gfosco | Hacker News Reader

It is unfortunate they are both scary companies. They both know too much about their users, and their users connections.

Even if you don't have a Facebook account, there is probably still some evidence of you in their system. Unlike Facebook, it would be pretty hard to not use Google at all, but it's at least possible to use their services and remain unidentified.

Photos are over-rated, but tell that to the ~500 million people stalking each other on Facebook. Glass is an incredible vision into the future of computing, or a chilling vision of the future where there is no disconnecting from the web of surveillance.

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The fact of the matter is that most people are less concerned about personal privacy and data security than they are maintaining social relationships, so while I don't disagree with your premise I would argue that your point is fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. I fully expect we'll end up with a few competing Skynets in the next couple of decades, but the best we can hope for is that their overlords are reasonable people. Imho, trying to avoid this is a fool's errand; we're better off educating people and creating peripheral controls to help guide the megaliths into an agreeable position.

As long as it's just companies that can be regulated by states and laws it's managable. The main task we have imho is to keep the governments out of the loop - we don't want the force monopoly combined with the data collection.

Surely that's not the best we can hope for—or work for. It is not out of the realm of possibility that distributed social networks, like email or Diaspora, can gain popularity. But I don't know how to make that appealing to average people.

If your concern is that a single entity is going to have your information, then Diaspora wouldn't help you anyways, as long as at least one of your friends is using a federated service that is a majority service (like blogger).

> where there is no disconnecting from the web of surveillance.

When you look at what has happened with mobile phone cameras and police brutality, it seems that this kind of tech does more active good than it does passive harm.

It's effectively impossible to avoid being visible to Facebook, since hundreds of thousands of websites implement the Facebook "Like" button which makes huge amounts of your browsing activity visible to them (by IP address if you're not logged into Facebook).

Not if you invoke the nuclear option and put every facebook domain (including the fbcdn stuff) in your hosts file as 0.0.0.0

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