And by the way, here's my idea I've been throwing around. It's just an idea and I'm not sure if it would even work or be worthwhile, but: A decentralized perso

And by the way, here's my idea I've been throwing around. It's just an idea and I'm not sure if it would even work or be worthwhile, but: A decentralized personal information protocol. Instead of joining a social network or other online service and putting all your personal information into their database, you run your own server (either truly on your own server if you want the most privacy or through a hosting service for this protocol if you want ease of setup) that contains a certain set of information which services can request (but you must authorize, like with OAuth). Information generated within those services is then saved to your server rather than their own. Thus if you cancel your account, you have sole control of the data. If they don't allow you to cancel your account, you can just revoke their access to your server. Problems: - Trust: You can't trust everyone to not save their own copies of the data themselves. Perhaps this could be semi-solved by having a machine readable license agreement for your data that the services agree to by connecting to it, giving you the ability to sue if they violate those terms. - Performance: Presumably there would be performance issues in something like a highly-interconnected social network if each person's data is on its own server. Some servers would be more reliable than others, too, leading to instability for the greater service using the data. - Public exposure: If the services using your data are, for example, Facebook-like in nature, where a large amount of the data is publicly displayed anyway, there is nothing stopping anyone from scraping it off the public-facing webpage and archiving it.