

Columbia Law Professor Says Americans Should Quit Facebook And Google - mark_l_watson
http://www.businessinsider.com/americans-should-quit-facebook-google-2013-6

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csense
I quit Facebook around 2007 or 2008. I never got accounts on Google or Gmail.

This decision had nothing to do with government spying, but not wanting to
become a customer of a big monopolist was one of my reasons. The article
notes,

> When you have enormous concentrations of data in a few hands, spying becomes
> very easy.

Forget about government spying. These big concentrations of data are also
juicy targets for hackers. And then there's the fact that you're at the mercy
of the vendor when you let yourself be locked into a hosted product. Look at
all the frustration people are having because Google is shutting down Reader.
I use Thunderbird for RSS, and it works well enough -- and I know that I'll
never have to deal with the headaches that Reader customers are going through.

HN needs more articles about decentralized, open-source Facebook killers.

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mark_l_watson
At first, I discounted this article because the title seemed a little extreme.

However, then I saw that the professor was Tim Wu.

I very much enjoyed Tim Wu's book "The Master Switch" which is all about
power, the elite, and manipulating media and communications architectures.

