I'm posting my comment I made for the original article. There should be a law stating that a service like Facebook which thrives on public data, should expose

I'm posting my comment I made for the original article. There should be a law stating that a service like Facebook which thrives on public data, should expose all of their data once they reach a critical mass like 10 Million people. Exposing may or may not be without people's consent, but getting the consent of users should not be a problem. This will make sure that a competitor or alternate entity can bootstrap their service with this data. You don't need to stay in facebook to stay in touch with your family. You can stay in your own service and you still will be able to communicate with people on facebook and similar other services. This will give a level playing field and stop having monopolies of corporations which thrive on user behavioral data. This idea was suggested by someone in a different form in a similar discussion here in HN, and I think it is terrific and it will solve most of the problems. It is not even necessary to have the law act when reaching a 10M critical mass. If some service calls itself a social network or related service, then they are bound to submit the data collected by them which is owned by the content user and not the service. Sure, they can operate by declaring themselves not as an social service, but by the time people realizes then there should be a penalty and immediate surrendering of past collected data. There are few concerns though IF this comes to fruition. Security: Right Now, all the FB related stuff are secured by some of the bright minds hired by Facebook. They have the financial muscle to protect the data they collect, even though that money might have flowed some unscrupulous advertising and tracking stuffs. If all the user behavioural data ends up in a central entity/repository, then there should be some neutral agency like UN handling all this data. But on the other hand, hiring highly technical people to safeguard this public information might not be possible financially and logistically. For example, Facebook has its own personal interests to secure the user related data. A common entity might not do as efficiently as it should, and even a small leak will lead to catatostrophic results with all the user information across different services laid bare. Accessibility: If all the user information shared across the internet ends up in a single place, then ownership and accessiblity of that data should be more refined and robust. I should have the ability to choose to whom I can share all that information irrespective of where I posted the content. People should be able to grant access to all of their data to be used by people like Facebook, even though the content was originally posted in facebook. Of course, there is Facebook in between if we have to realize anything remotely like this.