That clearly seems to me like they will be scrubbing not just IDs but also email addresses of my friends when I download my data. What do you base this on? "n

That clearly seems to me like they will be scrubbing not just IDs but also email addresses of my friends when I download my data. What do you base this on? "not your friends information, because that is not your information" suggests to me that you cannot download your friends' photos and status updates. That says nothing specifically of your friends' Facebook ids, which (privacy settings permitting) are public to the point of being indexed by Google. Further, the new social network, a Facebook competitor, would continue to be dependent on Facebook and any future changes to their TOS which they are forever subject to. Only for future updates. If someone wanted to leave, they could. What I dislike about your line of reasoning is that it presupposes that nothing has really changed, when the reality seems to be very different. Not only have developers been given access to Facebook data, they are allowed to cache it indefinitely (bound only to the user requesting removal). This is a radical departure from last year. I feel that it is important for this to be recognized on Hacker News, because this is the community that would most benefit from realizing that the field has changed. The social space has become more open (maybe temporarily) to competition, but this also signals that the incumbent has a strong enough position to allow this. A year or two ago, you might worry that Facebook would prevent you from getting any traction. Now you only have to worry that creating a competing network is so hard that Facebook thinks no one can do it. If you think that calling attention to factual inaccuracies requires being rude No, it doesn't. But it does get skin in the game, and at the right time that can be valuable. Also my self-description of rudeness is also an overstatement of a single sentence in my first post in this discussion. I hope that the rest of my commentary has not been viewed as such (maybe curt, but hopefully not rude). I never implied that people "really want to leave Facebook" Sorry if that was implied, it was a comment on the zeitgeist of Hacker News and not you specifically.