
Steve Wozniak shuts down his Facebook account in protest (2018) - TakakiTohno
https://nypost.com/2018/04/09/steve-wozniak-shuts-down-his-facebook-account-in-protest/
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50656E6973
>“The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the
profits back.”

>“As they say, with Facebook, you are the product.”

Whenever people become products or property of another party it's a pretty
good sign something has gone very wrong.

Perhaps its time we had a Personal Data Emancipation Proclimation and
positively asserted the intellectual property rights of one's own personal
information over those who seek to own it through coercion and deception.

The technically literate like Woz and many on HN are among the greatest
critics of these human data traffickers, while the technically illiterate
masses continue to "voluntarily" give up their data; reminiscent of how upon
learning to read, Frederick Douglass finally understood the reality of his
bondage while noting that his fellow slaves were contented in being illiterate
and ignorant.

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jarfil
Facebook gives its users access to a social platform, which is clearly
something users like, without asking for any money in return. It isn't like
they're forcing people to use it, people are free to decide for themselves
unlike slaves.

Of course no stuff is really free, so they have to get money some other way...
but maybe they should be more open about it, maybe offer an "enhanced privacy
mode" for like $10/month? You're still free to use any other social network
though, including the ability to self-host a blog and email if you wish.

~~~
omnimus
I think they tried in the past but their tests showed that it would be less
profitable and uncovering that they make more than 10usd/month on "free" users
would convince lot of users to leave.

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Boulth
Submission's title is inaccurate:

> Still, he didn’t delete his Facebook account — just deactivated it — for
> fear that someone else would snatch up the screen name “stevewoz.”

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nikhildahake
Would people be interested in a social network that allows them to own their
data? I built a prototype. Check it out here:
[https://www.timelines.co](https://www.timelines.co)

=Timelines -- A social network that allows you to own your data.

=Share beautiful moments of your life with friends, family or the world.

=Easily customize who sees which post.

=Maintain ownership of your data at all times. Timelines stores your data in a
specific folder on your Google Drive which is sandboxed from all your other
data on Google drive.

=You'll need a Google account to use Timelines!

What do you guys think?

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rambojazz
This looks like a bad joke. If I want to own my data I would not use your
website, especially given that it requires a Google Drive account.

~~~
nikhildahake
How else do you propose to own your data? What if I encrypt the data before
storing on Google drive and decrypt it after fetching from google drive?

Your data is pretty much all over the internet anyway. On HN news servers,
your mail servers, etc etc. So, how do you decide who to trust and who not to?

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zzo38computer
Private data I will store on my own computer. Public data I will store both on
my own computer and elsewhere, and I don't care where they copy it; it is
public so you can put it wherever you want to put.

~~~
nikhildahake
Let's say you are sharing pictures with your friends and you want them to
access those pictures even when your computer is offline. That would mean that
those pictures need to be stored on a server from where they can be served.
So, we can rule out your computer.

How do you propose that we store the data in this case? I can only think of
storing it on some server in an encrypted form. Your thoughts?

~~~
zzo38computer
Depending on the intended distribution, I might use DVDs or printouts or other
kind of physical media like that. But, for some uses that won't do, so then
you would encrypt them and store them on a server.

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egypturnash
(2018)

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old_news_is_old
that article is more than one year old published April 9, 2018

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dTal
You created an account just to say that?

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lightedman
Well, obviously HN doesn't allow non-registered readers to comment, so...

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chillacy
(April 9, 2018)

