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Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

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Re: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

#101

Post by wmf »

cookiecaper wrote: post #99
wmf wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why your "peer" should be a cloud server, not a PC. Call it S2S architecture.

Right, but then you still have all of your data off somewhere in someone else's control. It'd possibly even be worse than Facebook, because an open "provider" that doesn't do anything except host data for Facebook & co. wouldn't be bringing any revenue, and thus would be tempted just to sell all the data you upload. The point shouldn't be to cut out Facebook, it should be to keep the user in complete control of their…

Obviously you can only trust a server if you pay for it and have a good contract. It's like an apartment or a safe deposit box.

Re: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

#102

Post by darko »

mahmud wrote: post #23
Detrus wrote: post #15

Yea let's get an open alternative, a few years of coding, a few years of Facebook screwing up, a massive hatefest, and it will have 30% penetration in 2018. By then there will be new technologies that will make the issue irrelevant. Same as Linux and Firefox. By the time the community effort got it together, most of the effort was obsolete. Google's Chrome OS throws much of linux away. NativeClient sandboxing turns b…

FWIW, I have written a facebook clone in Common Lisp and took me 2 months. It has profile pages, a platform for 3rd party apps, elaborate RBAC-based security, and a rudimentary service API. If anybody wants to take this in some direction, I am more than happy to come aboard.

is there anyway we can take a look at it?

Re: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

#103

Post by cookiecaper »

wmf wrote: post #101
cookiecaper wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but then you still have all of your data off somewhere in someone else's control. It'd possibly even be worse than Facebook, because an open "provider" that doesn't do anything except host data for Facebook & co. wouldn't be bringing any revenue, and thus would be tempted just to sell all the data you upload. The point shouldn't be to cut out Facebook, it should be to keep the user in complete control of their…

Obviously you can only trust a server if you pay for it and have a good contract. It's like an apartment or a safe deposit box.

And how many are going to pay for server space when you say "this is like Facebook, but more secure", and how many are just going to stick with Facebook?

Re: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

#104

Post by wmf »

cookiecaper wrote: post #103
wmf wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously you can only trust a server if you pay for it and have a good contract. It's like an apartment or a safe deposit box.

And how many are going to pay for server space when you say "this is like Facebook, but more secure", and how many are just going to stick with Facebook?

IMO people deserve as much privacy as they're willing to pay for. If some people choose to stick with Facebook, that's not my problem.

Re: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

#105

Post by krschultz »

gaius wrote: post #96
sounddust wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook itself used to have this level of privacy protection. You could join a group and post on the wall and in the forums for that group privately. If your privacy settings were to disallow non-friends from seeing your profile, then it would just show your first name and a generic placeholder as your photo. Your name would be unclickable and therefore untraceable to you unless you had a unique first name. Ironical…

The thing is, this doesn't even make sense for FB to do. I've removed my interests and activities from my profile. Before the ads I got shown were basically relevant - they were mainly for products and services connected to those sports I listed, for example. Now the ads I get shown are fairly random. So Facebook have reduced my value to them as a set of eyeballs to show ads to. How can anyone at FB have thought this…

I've done the same thing as you and noticed the same effect on the ads shown to me, but when I mentioned my privacy concerns to some friends the other night, most just said "so what, I don't have much of value on Facebook anyway". I think the mass of people (even intelligent people) don't have the same privacy concerns as a lot of the "tech informed" crowd does.

We know how valuable the data is and what can be done with it, that makes us much more sensitive to giving it up.

Re: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

#106

Post by Gormo »

mbrubeck wrote: post #82
thingie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how could any Facebook replacement (or Facebook itself) allow somebody to support some group while not telling anyone. Of course it's possible, donate some money, do some job for them, but… on Facebook or something like Facebook? How?

Facebook is also a way for groups to communicate with their supporters, plan private events, and let members locate each other. It would be useful for many groups to do that without broadcasting group membership.

Meetup?

Re: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

#107

Post by sounddust »

brown9-2 wrote: post #81
sounddust wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A. Facebook has made it clear during the big "everyone" push that hiding your friends on your profile page is not the same thing as hiding it from public access; it is still considered public information by Facebook and can be accessed as such. B. Much of your personal data is still publicly available through Facebook Graph, regardless of how much you try to lock down your profile. It's only a matter of time before p…

B. Much of your personal data is still publicly available through Facebook Graph, regardless of how much you try to lock down your profile. I don't think this is true, as an example here is what the graph API shows about my account: { "id": "800679", "name": "Matthew Brown", "first_name": "Matthew", "last_name": "Brown", "location": { "id": null, "name": null }, "gender": "male" } In the past I've had to go through a…

1) The graph also shares your picture (800679/picture?type=large), likes (800679/likes) and your timezone as well. I consider this "much of your personal data."

2) Before the Graph, it was possible to hide all of this information completely if you used the strictest privacy settings. You could completely hide the fact that you had a facebook account; even the things you published on public FB pages would just show your first name and a placeholder photo.

3) Before the Graph, it wasn't possible to systematically scrape the info of all Facebook users sequentially. The fact that this is now possible will make it easy to collate the data and publish information about you that you haven't personally shared. Most users' photo albums are set to "everyone" (by accident, of course), but previously they were pretty much undiscoverable even if they were public. I'm pretty certain that this is going to be exploted by sploggers and others, just like every other large publicly accessible source of data.

Re: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

#108

Post by ay »

mahmud wrote: post #23
Detrus wrote: post #15

Yea let's get an open alternative, a few years of coding, a few years of Facebook screwing up, a massive hatefest, and it will have 30% penetration in 2018. By then there will be new technologies that will make the issue irrelevant. Same as Linux and Firefox. By the time the community effort got it together, most of the effort was obsolete. Google's Chrome OS throws much of linux away. NativeClient sandboxing turns b…

FWIW, I have written a facebook clone in Common Lisp and took me 2 months. It has profile pages, a platform for 3rd party apps, elaborate RBAC-based security, and a rudimentary service API. If anybody wants to take this in some direction, I am more than happy to come aboard.

Does it allow the export of the data out ? Any service implemented with the intent "to be good", needs a built-in parachute for the users to use when it "becomes evil".

Re: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

#109

Post by mahmud »

darko wrote: post #102
mahmud wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I have written a facebook clone in Common Lisp and took me 2 months. It has profile pages, a platform for 3rd party apps, elaborate RBAC-based security, and a rudimentary service API. If anybody wants to take this in some direction, I am more than happy to come aboard.

is there anyway we can take a look at it?

Anybody who sent me an email gets a preview after I clean it up in a week.

Re: Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

#110

Post by pnelly »

we need an open source alternative

BUT, what we really need to do is use facebook data on the open source alternative platform. So, someone can see activity feeds from their facebook account and from their facebook friends on this platform. It makes the transition to another platform smoother.

Then, when facebook send their legal team to crush this, Use it as a means of publicizing the fact that "hey guys, facebook says it owns YOUR data and it doesn't want to share, but there is this really great open source alternative that you can sign up for"...

of course, the message would be spread via facebook and we could all watch zuckerberg scramble to delete all these posts and links being passed around about how dirty facebook is. (I've actually noticed some of my posts about facebook on facebook deleted!!!)

The virality of facebook could also be a chink in it's armor. People have far more power than any one entity when organized collectively.

If anyone else is serious about it, I will personally offer my services to a project such as this. A truly open network would be a dream come true, and another great success of the internet age and further proof that success does not always have to be monetized.

To quote Bill Hicks (to the marketers): "Stop putting a dollar sign on every damn thing on this planet!!!"

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