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We did replace it, almost 10 years ago. It was called Diaspora[1], no one cared about privacy then. No one really cares about privacy now, at least not enough t

We did replace it, almost 10 years ago. It was called Diaspora[1], no one cared about privacy then. No one really cares about privacy now, at least not enough to do anything about it. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

noobermin 9y ago
I think people care a lot more today than they used too. The problem is people use facebook because they have to.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  If people really cared about their privacy they wouldn't broadcast their personal lives to millions of people (see social media). Until that's corrected (how do you get out of that social cycle where you have to market and yell louder than everyone else?), it's going to continue. People are mad at FB the same way people get mad when they realize they've been in manipulative relationships, but I'm not sure many people really want to accept that they gave into that despite all the warning signs that have been there for years and it's their own actions which enabled FB to be what it is. Some of the issue is the belief that anyone really needs FB. We've conditioned ourselves into it, but you don't need it any more than you need TV.
  - hellofunk 9y ago
    > If people really cared about their privacy they wouldn't broadcast their personal lives to millions of people Most FB users certainly do not expect that they are sending out their photos and opinions and chats to millions of people. They have a circle of friends and family that they think are behind a wall called their network, and that circle is usually a few hundred people or less.
    - losvedir 9y ago
      To be clear, that's accurate, right? They're not sending their photos and opinions out to millions of people. As far as I know, this whole Cambridge Analytica thing was about profile data, not messages or photos.
  - Joeboy 9y ago
    > People are mad at FB the same way people get mad when they realize they've been in manipulative relationships To run with the simile, maybe some people remain in abusive relationships because of a reasonable fear that leaving will have consequences that are worse than staying.
- obstacle1 9y ago
  >The problem is people use facebook because they have to. It's remarkable how common this opinion is given its obvious shallowness. Nobody has to use Facebook. What are the consequences of not? You can't chat with your friends or view their selfies or see event listings. Or rather to do these things, you have to make an effort to use some other more private mode of communication like phone or in-person or classifieds or whatever. It's easier to use Facebook than to not. That is an extremely far cry from "having to" use the service. The problem really is people are lazy, and use Facebook because it saves them time, effort, and energy. In most cases, people care about this saved energy more than they do their privacy.
  - noobermin 9y ago
    You really read my comment in the worst possible light. No one has to use facebook but so many people connect through it that there are social costs to not using it. If people want to connect with you, you can't use messenger or groups, bam, that cuts off a lot of your connection with others. I didn't mean that using facebook is a requirement for life and I'm not sure why your first inclination is to read others' comments that way.
  - aninhumer 9y ago
    I wouldn't go quite as far as saying people "have to" use Facebook, but there are fairly significant social costs to someone who chooses not to. Many people's friends communicate primarily via Facebook, and you can't just get around that by using phones and emails. People have discussions, invite people to events and post important life updates on Facebook. Often the primary communication mechanism for an organisation or even a local business will be Facebook. And they often won't re-circulate all that information via email just for the benefit of people who don't use it. And yet people insist on trivialising these costs, and blaming individuals for this massive invasion of privacy because they chose not to incur these costs, rather than questioning the circumstances that have led to people feeling forced to make such a choice. Do you really think the people who are having their privacy violated explicitly chose that trade off because they're "lazy"? Or do you think, presented with a choice between signing up to a seemingly innocuous helpful website, or encroaching social isolation as their friends start using it, they chose the former?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
verylittlemeat 9y ago
Man I remember the enthusiasm behind Diaspora like it was yesterday. I can still see in my minds eye that NYTimes article photo of the creators sitting around like they just invented cold fusion or something.
- marban 9y ago
  Allaire ColdFusion wasn't that big either ;)
  - 220V_USKettle 9y ago
    Still crankin' w' Lucee today, dude.
- anc84 9y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html I looked what they were up to now: Suicide, Snapchat, backerkit.com (crowdfunding related service), unknown.
- Joeboy 9y ago
  I think the hype was really thrust upon them by the breathless NYT article and the unexpectedly massive donations to their Kickstarter. They did their best to run with it, and were met with limited success and widespread vitriol that was not really deserved.
Jean-Philipe 9y ago
Diaspora is actually worse for privacy, because of its distributed nature. Diaspora is about distributed ownership. If you value privacy in a social network, check out https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork
- yndoendo 9y ago
  IPV6 is really needed to create social media distribution with customized privacy. Example, use a smart phone as the actually distributing and access control system. This way a person can instantly block and know who is accessing their content too. End to end encryption communication with content distribution. Of course this is more into the future when Cellular ISP are better with less strict data caps and better upload speeds along with not having to connection to Apple or Google or Amazon for Voice to Text / Command / Action solutions and smart phones actually have a viable storage capacity.
  - agsamek 9y ago
    Please do not downvote this comment. It may not make technical sense for you but there is nothing wrong with the comment otherwise. The author has some vision and shared it with us.
- soapdog 9y ago
  Hey I Love Scuttlebutt, I am actually writing a client for it. But I don't think the objective here is privacy. If I follow you on ssb, I will start replicating your feed (unless you block me), and all you post publicly will be in my own HD which I could use to generate some "intelligence". There are no incentives in ssb for those marketing type actions we see on FB and Twitter but we can still mine it. Of course your private communication is private, but the public feed is very public.
  - fenwick67 9y ago
    SSB does support encrypted private messaging, notably. You could send a private message to a group of (7 or fewer) friends and then only they could open it.
tomcooks 9y ago
It was not about privacy, it still isn't about privacy. It's about usability, and the flocking to Mastodon when there are better options around is the proof of this theory of mine.
- jug 9y ago
  Yes. It's absolutely about four simple steps: 1. Going to a mobile-first website or app. 2. Clicking a link. 3. Typing in your new e-mail and password. 4. Being able to add anyone in the world as friends. It cannot be about local "hubs" vs the global "public" / federation, being forced to make that distinction would feel like a step backwards for the users. It can be distributed in the back end, but not in the front end. It also needs to look beautiful.
  - pnutjam 9y ago
    Anybody check out https://mewe.com https://mewe.com
    - corobo 9y ago
      > No spying. No cookies. No data sharing. How do you stay logged in if there's no cookies? It also looks like they try to do too much. Cure-alls cure nothing (thanks for the quip, Sawbones podcast!)
      - catach 9y ago
        From their privacy page: "We don’t track you personally and we never sell your personal data. Here is what we track: we track how users use our site in general so that we can make it better. We are monitoring traffic, usage activity, site performance, and we use general analytic tools so that we can improve your experience. We do not associate any of this data with you personally. We never sell or share your personally identifiable information unless required to do so by law."
        corobo 9y ago
bamboozled 9y ago
Really? I don't think so, it would be good if someone did a study on this though. Most people I know think privacy is important. I do think people are communicating via other mediums more than before though. It's anecdotal but most of my family and friends just gravitate towards iMessage , Facetime and Telegram to communicate by default now. Could it be that people don't care about this issue because they care about Facebook anymore? There are alternatives now, people will just use them more and more over time.
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  > Most people I know think privacy is important. The question is, how representative are those people of the population at large?
  - unclebucknasty 9y ago
    >how representative are those people of the population at large? Another question is whether people truly understand their privacy exposure? They know FB has some information on them because they submit it, but they don't know how much info in total (sites visited, location tracking, etc), how that data is combined/used, who has access to it, etc. And, they assume that whatever FB is doing with their data must be OK/legal because laws. I think that's what we saw with reactions to these recent revelations. When an inkling of the real privacy exposure surfaced, people freaked.
  - catach 9y ago
    And the follow-up question is, how much do they think it's important relative to other things?
- Joeboy 9y ago
  > Most people I know think privacy is important. Of course they do. What sort of person is going to tick the "I don't care about privacy" box? I guess the same kind of person that ticks the "I'm OK with mass extinction" box. Those opinions are not very relevant in the real world.
Sir_Substance 9y ago
Diaspora (still!) doesn't do: 1. Chat (It could just integrate a javascript XMPP client and let people use whatever chat server they liked) 2. Event management and invites When I suggest people leave Facebook, these are the things people complain there are no alternatives to.
- jhasse 9y ago
  > 2. Event management and invites https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1359 https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1359
  - Joeboy 9y ago
    So via that link it looks like a PR that "adds event entities" was merged in January. Which sounds vaguely promising, although I'm not sure what it means in practice for end users.
  - dbbk 9y ago
    That issue has been open for 7 years... what is your point? To me that only demonstrates that the project is dead.
    - jhasse 9y ago
      No point, just wanted to link to it.
- rebuilder 9y ago
  #2 is especially galling, as it's actually, to me, the only really compelling service Facebook provides.
- dbbk 9y ago
  I don't know what it's like in the US, but in the UK pretty much all of university social life is organised via Facebook Events and Groups. There literally is no other option available that people could move to, except for maybe Meetup.com, which would be a poor substitute.
sitepodmatt 9y ago
Similar story as app.net, the paid twitter replacement that was cool for 33 seconds, arguably poor naming though on both counts given one suggests something else and the second I have no idea how to pronounce.
chillingeffect 9y ago
I just joined yesterday. It will take some time to wind it up. Even fb took a long time to build before it was relavant. Nobody cared back then bc they hadn't felt they burn of foreign influence on our election. And diaspora will have to grow. Even some basic things can improve the on boarding process. For example, uploading my profile was diverted due to a cap on picture upload size of 4.2 MB.
corobo 9y ago
I get flashbacks to scrolling error messages whenever someone mentions Diaspora. Just horrible software to use if it ever had an issue. Great when starting but the maintenance time costs were too high Nothing to do with not caring about privacy, I really did try to use it. Even had 100 users or so on my open instance. It was on par with running a public email service. Not my circus.
bsenftner 9y ago
They were "selected" because they were likely to fail, gave pithy interviews, and were young and hopeful. Facebook even gave them $50K - that is not competition, that is coddling a child.
wdr1 9y ago
+1 In reality, people aren't upset about privacy. They're upset Trump won.
- silverbax88 9y ago
  They're not upset about privacy, they're upset the election was stolen. They didn't care when those of us with experience in election issues brought this up 20 years ago, they didn't care in 2000, they didn't care until suddenly a pretend-billionaire reality star stole an election. As soon as they can get rid of him, they will go back to not caring, even though it's more dangerous than ever and we've been telling them for decades.
- georgeecollins 9y ago
  It's not fair to say they don't care about privacy when by in large when they are surrendering it they are not aware. The average person has a very low awareness of the long term implications to the loss of privacy and how affect say, their chances of getting a job, or getting the best price for a product. But they will figure it out. When I read about the Cambridge Analitica story I was kind of shocked anyone was surprised by what they are doing. I have seen companies hoover up data from Facebook in a similar way so I have always understood that under their old ToS any friend could give away your data by participating in an app. It had been like that for a long time (they changed the ToS-- I believe in 2015). That seemed terrible to me, years ago. The fact that it took people so long to be shocked about it just shows that their is going to be a long lag between when these things happen and when popular consciousness catches up with the implications.
md2be 9y ago
This is typical NYT writing articles that support its one agenda. if we need to replace something it’s the nyt
- komali2 9y ago
  >one agenda Can you clarify what you believe the New York Times' agenda is, as demonstrated by this opinion piece article, and how "Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia," has been employed to propagate the NYT agenda? Also, why should the NYT be replaced, and what should it be replaced by?
heedlessly3 9y ago
people do care about privacy to some degree. Part of the reason (although not entire) is why many users like Snapchat because it doesn't keep a history of your messages. Snapchat doesn't use targeted ads like FB does. That's why everyone gets Kylie Jenner ads instead of personalized marketing
wink 9y ago
There's "I care about privacy" and "I have a bunch reasons to dislike Diaspora, so I won't use it". Not speaking for everyone, of course - but I know a lot of people who didn't like it for one reason or another.
on_and_off 9y ago
>No one really cares about privacy now I spoke with several non-tech people about the facebook fiasco. The issue is that even a brilliant neurosurgeon does not understand the TOS he has signed with Facebook and what they entail. Surely, there is some naïveté from people that don't expect facebook to do much with their data, but tech has also failed to teach users about this. Even self proclaimed privacy champions routinely make you sign dozen of pages of ToS that are updated on a whim.
- rmc 9y ago
  This is why a contract should not be legally binding if it's unclear. I don't mean "clear to a lawyer", but what the common person, spending the standard, common amount of time, with the advice you expect them to have[1], would think of as "clear". EU Data Protection law (like the GDPR) helps here, requiring informed consent. If you don't understand something, then you're not informed, and it shouldn't be binding. [1] When (say) signing a form for surgery, the surgon can presume that the person has been advised by a doctor. When buying a house, you can presume a lawyer was involved, etc. When signing a ToS for Facebook, we all know there was no legal advice recieved.

noobermin 9y ago

I think people care a lot more today than they used too. The problem is people use facebook because they have to.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
If people really cared about their privacy they wouldn't broadcast their personal lives to millions of people (see social media). Until that's corrected (how do you get out of that social cycle where you have to market and yell louder than everyone else?), it's going to continue. People are mad at FB the same way people get mad when they realize they've been in manipulative relationships, but I'm not sure many people really want to accept that they gave into that despite all the warning signs that have been there for years and it's their own actions which enabled FB to be what it is. Some of the issue is the belief that anyone really needs FB. We've conditioned ourselves into it, but you don't need it any more than you need TV.
- hellofunk 9y ago
  > If people really cared about their privacy they wouldn't broadcast their personal lives to millions of people Most FB users certainly do not expect that they are sending out their photos and opinions and chats to millions of people. They have a circle of friends and family that they think are behind a wall called their network, and that circle is usually a few hundred people or less.
  - losvedir 9y ago
    To be clear, that's accurate, right? They're not sending their photos and opinions out to millions of people. As far as I know, this whole Cambridge Analytica thing was about profile data, not messages or photos.
- Joeboy 9y ago
  > People are mad at FB the same way people get mad when they realize they've been in manipulative relationships To run with the simile, maybe some people remain in abusive relationships because of a reasonable fear that leaving will have consequences that are worse than staying.
obstacle1 9y ago
>The problem is people use facebook because they have to. It's remarkable how common this opinion is given its obvious shallowness. Nobody has to use Facebook. What are the consequences of not? You can't chat with your friends or view their selfies or see event listings. Or rather to do these things, you have to make an effort to use some other more private mode of communication like phone or in-person or classifieds or whatever. It's easier to use Facebook than to not. That is an extremely far cry from "having to" use the service. The problem really is people are lazy, and use Facebook because it saves them time, effort, and energy. In most cases, people care about this saved energy more than they do their privacy.
- noobermin 9y ago
  You really read my comment in the worst possible light. No one has to use facebook but so many people connect through it that there are social costs to not using it. If people want to connect with you, you can't use messenger or groups, bam, that cuts off a lot of your connection with others. I didn't mean that using facebook is a requirement for life and I'm not sure why your first inclination is to read others' comments that way.
- aninhumer 9y ago
  I wouldn't go quite as far as saying people "have to" use Facebook, but there are fairly significant social costs to someone who chooses not to. Many people's friends communicate primarily via Facebook, and you can't just get around that by using phones and emails. People have discussions, invite people to events and post important life updates on Facebook. Often the primary communication mechanism for an organisation or even a local business will be Facebook. And they often won't re-circulate all that information via email just for the benefit of people who don't use it. And yet people insist on trivialising these costs, and blaming individuals for this massive invasion of privacy because they chose not to incur these costs, rather than questioning the circumstances that have led to people feeling forced to make such a choice. Do you really think the people who are having their privacy violated explicitly chose that trade off because they're "lazy"? Or do you think, presented with a choice between signing up to a seemingly innocuous helpful website, or encroaching social isolation as their friends start using it, they chose the former?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

verylittlemeat 9y ago

Man I remember the enthusiasm behind Diaspora like it was yesterday. I can still see in my minds eye that NYTimes article photo of the creators sitting around like they just invented cold fusion or something.

marban 9y ago
Allaire ColdFusion wasn't that big either ;)
- 220V_USKettle 9y ago
  Still crankin' w' Lucee today, dude.
anc84 9y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html I looked what they were up to now: Suicide, Snapchat, backerkit.com (crowdfunding related service), unknown.
Joeboy 9y ago
I think the hype was really thrust upon them by the breathless NYT article and the unexpectedly massive donations to their Kickstarter. They did their best to run with it, and were met with limited success and widespread vitriol that was not really deserved.

Jean-Philipe 9y ago

Diaspora is actually worse for privacy, because of its distributed nature. Diaspora is about distributed ownership. If you value privacy in a social network, check out https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

yndoendo 9y ago
IPV6 is really needed to create social media distribution with customized privacy. Example, use a smart phone as the actually distributing and access control system. This way a person can instantly block and know who is accessing their content too. End to end encryption communication with content distribution. Of course this is more into the future when Cellular ISP are better with less strict data caps and better upload speeds along with not having to connection to Apple or Google or Amazon for Voice to Text / Command / Action solutions and smart phones actually have a viable storage capacity.
- agsamek 9y ago
  Please do not downvote this comment. It may not make technical sense for you but there is nothing wrong with the comment otherwise. The author has some vision and shared it with us.
soapdog 9y ago
Hey I Love Scuttlebutt, I am actually writing a client for it. But I don't think the objective here is privacy. If I follow you on ssb, I will start replicating your feed (unless you block me), and all you post publicly will be in my own HD which I could use to generate some "intelligence". There are no incentives in ssb for those marketing type actions we see on FB and Twitter but we can still mine it. Of course your private communication is private, but the public feed is very public.
- fenwick67 9y ago
  SSB does support encrypted private messaging, notably. You could send a private message to a group of (7 or fewer) friends and then only they could open it.

tomcooks 9y ago

It was not about privacy, it still isn't about privacy. It's about usability, and the flocking to Mastodon when there are better options around is the proof of this theory of mine.

jug 9y ago
Yes. It's absolutely about four simple steps: 1. Going to a mobile-first website or app. 2. Clicking a link. 3. Typing in your new e-mail and password. 4. Being able to add anyone in the world as friends. It cannot be about local "hubs" vs the global "public" / federation, being forced to make that distinction would feel like a step backwards for the users. It can be distributed in the back end, but not in the front end. It also needs to look beautiful.
- pnutjam 9y ago
  Anybody check out https://mewe.com https://mewe.com
  - corobo 9y ago
    > No spying. No cookies. No data sharing. How do you stay logged in if there's no cookies? It also looks like they try to do too much. Cure-alls cure nothing (thanks for the quip, Sawbones podcast!)
    - catach 9y ago
      From their privacy page: "We don’t track you personally and we never sell your personal data. Here is what we track: we track how users use our site in general so that we can make it better. We are monitoring traffic, usage activity, site performance, and we use general analytic tools so that we can improve your experience. We do not associate any of this data with you personally. We never sell or share your personally identifiable information unless required to do so by law."
      - corobo 9y ago

bamboozled 9y ago

Really? I don't think so, it would be good if someone did a study on this though. Most people I know think privacy is important. I do think people are communicating via other mediums more than before though. It's anecdotal but most of my family and friends just gravitate towards iMessage , Facetime and Telegram to communicate by default now. Could it be that people don't care about this issue because they care about Facebook anymore? There are alternatives now, people will just use them more and more over time.

jamesrcole 9y ago
> Most people I know think privacy is important. The question is, how representative are those people of the population at large?
- unclebucknasty 9y ago
  >how representative are those people of the population at large? Another question is whether people truly understand their privacy exposure? They know FB has some information on them because they submit it, but they don't know how much info in total (sites visited, location tracking, etc), how that data is combined/used, who has access to it, etc. And, they assume that whatever FB is doing with their data must be OK/legal because laws. I think that's what we saw with reactions to these recent revelations. When an inkling of the real privacy exposure surfaced, people freaked.
- catach 9y ago
  And the follow-up question is, how much do they think it's important relative to other things?
Joeboy 9y ago
> Most people I know think privacy is important. Of course they do. What sort of person is going to tick the "I don't care about privacy" box? I guess the same kind of person that ticks the "I'm OK with mass extinction" box. Those opinions are not very relevant in the real world.

Sir_Substance 9y ago

Diaspora (still!) doesn't do: 1. Chat (It could just integrate a javascript XMPP client and let people use whatever chat server they liked) 2. Event management and invites When I suggest people leave Facebook, these are the things people complain there are no alternatives to.

jhasse 9y ago
> 2. Event management and invites https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1359 https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1359
- Joeboy 9y ago
  So via that link it looks like a PR that "adds event entities" was merged in January. Which sounds vaguely promising, although I'm not sure what it means in practice for end users.
- dbbk 9y ago
  That issue has been open for 7 years... what is your point? To me that only demonstrates that the project is dead.
  - jhasse 9y ago
    No point, just wanted to link to it.
rebuilder 9y ago
#2 is especially galling, as it's actually, to me, the only really compelling service Facebook provides.
dbbk 9y ago
I don't know what it's like in the US, but in the UK pretty much all of university social life is organised via Facebook Events and Groups. There literally is no other option available that people could move to, except for maybe Meetup.com, which would be a poor substitute.

sitepodmatt 9y ago

Similar story as app.net, the paid twitter replacement that was cool for 33 seconds, arguably poor naming though on both counts given one suggests something else and the second I have no idea how to pronounce.

chillingeffect 9y ago

I just joined yesterday. It will take some time to wind it up. Even fb took a long time to build before it was relavant. Nobody cared back then bc they hadn't felt they burn of foreign influence on our election. And diaspora will have to grow. Even some basic things can improve the on boarding process. For example, uploading my profile was diverted due to a cap on picture upload size of 4.2 MB.

corobo 9y ago

I get flashbacks to scrolling error messages whenever someone mentions Diaspora. Just horrible software to use if it ever had an issue. Great when starting but the maintenance time costs were too high Nothing to do with not caring about privacy, I really did try to use it. Even had 100 users or so on my open instance. It was on par with running a public email service. Not my circus.

bsenftner 9y ago

They were "selected" because they were likely to fail, gave pithy interviews, and were young and hopeful. Facebook even gave them $50K - that is not competition, that is coddling a child.

wdr1 9y ago

+1 In reality, people aren't upset about privacy. They're upset Trump won.

silverbax88 9y ago
They're not upset about privacy, they're upset the election was stolen. They didn't care when those of us with experience in election issues brought this up 20 years ago, they didn't care in 2000, they didn't care until suddenly a pretend-billionaire reality star stole an election. As soon as they can get rid of him, they will go back to not caring, even though it's more dangerous than ever and we've been telling them for decades.
georgeecollins 9y ago
It's not fair to say they don't care about privacy when by in large when they are surrendering it they are not aware. The average person has a very low awareness of the long term implications to the loss of privacy and how affect say, their chances of getting a job, or getting the best price for a product. But they will figure it out. When I read about the Cambridge Analitica story I was kind of shocked anyone was surprised by what they are doing. I have seen companies hoover up data from Facebook in a similar way so I have always understood that under their old ToS any friend could give away your data by participating in an app. It had been like that for a long time (they changed the ToS-- I believe in 2015). That seemed terrible to me, years ago. The fact that it took people so long to be shocked about it just shows that their is going to be a long lag between when these things happen and when popular consciousness catches up with the implications.

md2be 9y ago

This is typical NYT writing articles that support its one agenda. if we need to replace something it’s the nyt

komali2 9y ago
>one agenda Can you clarify what you believe the New York Times' agenda is, as demonstrated by this opinion piece article, and how "Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia," has been employed to propagate the NYT agenda? Also, why should the NYT be replaced, and what should it be replaced by?

heedlessly3 9y ago

people do care about privacy to some degree. Part of the reason (although not entire) is why many users like Snapchat because it doesn't keep a history of your messages. Snapchat doesn't use targeted ads like FB does. That's why everyone gets Kylie Jenner ads instead of personalized marketing

wink 9y ago

There's "I care about privacy" and "I have a bunch reasons to dislike Diaspora, so I won't use it". Not speaking for everyone, of course - but I know a lot of people who didn't like it for one reason or another.

on_and_off 9y ago

>No one really cares about privacy now I spoke with several non-tech people about the facebook fiasco. The issue is that even a brilliant neurosurgeon does not understand the TOS he has signed with Facebook and what they entail. Surely, there is some naïveté from people that don't expect facebook to do much with their data, but tech has also failed to teach users about this. Even self proclaimed privacy champions routinely make you sign dozen of pages of ToS that are updated on a whim.

rmc 9y ago
This is why a contract should not be legally binding if it's unclear. I don't mean "clear to a lawyer", but what the common person, spending the standard, common amount of time, with the advice you expect them to have[1], would think of as "clear". EU Data Protection law (like the GDPR) helps here, requiring informed consent. If you don't understand something, then you're not informed, and it shouldn't be binding. [1] When (say) signing a form for surgery, the surgon can presume that the person has been advised by a doctor. When buying a house, you can presume a lawyer was involved, etc. When signing a ToS for Facebook, we all know there was no legal advice recieved.