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At a whim, you and your family/friends can stop using Facebook and use any of literally hundreds of other excellent options for communication.

That's control. And privacy is much better now than it was in the "glorious early days of the internet" when your two choices were SMTP and IRC and both were subject to monitoring by local sysadmins and pretty much any node your packets passed through.

Just because the present is not perfect does not mean the past was better. I much prefer the privacy and control of today's internet over yesterday's internet.



Facebook tags photos with my face in it without my permission. How do I as a non-Facebook user stop that?

How do I prevent Google from reading my email conversations when a huge chunk of the destinations are on the Gmail platform?

I DON'T have control. And I DON'T like it.


You can't stop it because you don't control your friends. These are their pictures, their email conversations.

I fear the set of Orwellian rules that would be required to make you happy.


I don't mind that my friends have access. Controlling that would be Orwellian.

I mind that Google and Facebook have access. They are already Orwellian, and figuring out how to control that would be anti-Orwellian.


>At a whim, you and your family/friends can stop using Facebook

Said nobody who truly understands network effects or knows someone who depends on Facebook for day-to-day communication with 5-10 people.

Quitting Facebook by yourself is easy but it's pointless if your friends don't do the same. Forcing your social circle to switch at the same time (particularly if they aren't technologically inclined) is folly.




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