

Ask HN: Is there an opportunity for a private Facebook-like social network? - jellybean

Facebook is only going to open up its site even more in the foreseeable future, and I've thinking lately that there may be a need for (I know, I know) yet another social network, one that's primary focus is on privacy. No gimmicks, no silly apps and games. Just sharing with friends and family the way it's supposed to be. No butchering our high-res pics to circa-1995 JPG quality. Default is private. Nothing gets exposed to your network unless you explicitly ask for it to be. Friend lists are also hidden by default.<p>What do you guys think? Surely the majority of people will be happy keeping their Facebook account. But few will prefer to take their online presence to a more setting. And once you make the switch, if your close friends and family members really care about keeping in touch with you, they'll understand and make an effort by opening an account to check out the reason why you've left Facebook.<p>Ideas/thoughts greatly appreciated.
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makecheck
The opportunity may not be exactly what you'd think, because privacy is
basically a fallacy for the kinds of information and images that are currently
published. What has to change is the nature of the data that is public;
specifically, data itself must become much less valuable, and this tends to
require new protocols.

For instance, you shouldn't have to "give" anything precious to a web site you
barely know; there ought to be a way to hand them a proxy that becomes useless
under certain conditions (e.g. after 24 hours have passed, after transferring
to some other web site, or similar criteria). This reduces the security
problem to one of probability: the time horizon is so small, and the data so
fragile, that it is unlikely anyone will see a reason to steal it, or
accidentally share it.

Some solutions are available already. For example, people can create throw-
away E-mail accounts to limit their exposure, and perhaps they just need to be
encouraged to do so.

Having said this, it's difficult to imagine ever securing some kinds of data.
This is an age with nearly-ubiquitous mobile surveillance devices and Internet
connectivity, so how can a web site even claim to safeguard images, for
example? You can't know everyone who has seen you in public; you can't know
about every cell phone picture that may have been taken of you, much less
posted somewhere, with a "tag" showing your name. The best thing a web site
can do is be honest about this reality, and flat out tell users that there is
no way to perfectly-secure images of them.

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cmelbye
You'd have a hard time getting people to use it, because I've found that the
majority of people dislike change. Adults particularly that have become
accustomed to Facebook are not going to use a beta quality social network that
doesn't work like Facebook did. Because of that difficulty to bootstrap the
community, people will have less of a reason to use it. For me, I care more
about being able to communicate with friends and family much more than I do
the privacy of the things I'm uploading.

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gfodor
Facebook thought like this too, but then realized they needed to make money to
keep the site running.

You too will have this problem, unless you come up with a better solution than
what Facebook has. Namely, slowly trickle enough data out to turn profitable,
and then (likely) stop pushing the envelope.

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jellybean
My (overly optimistic?) assumption is that anyone who would be drawn to such
an alternative underdog would be willing to fork up a small membership fee if
they're still happy with the service after six months. Another option is to
make it so that one membership fee (say $15 annually) includes their own use
as well as that of 5 friends of their choosing, which would make for an
incentive to invite close family members to join.

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wmf
Private Social Networking... we can call it PriSoN.

Ultimately I think learning how to lock down Facebook will be less work
(especially if there are third-party apps to help) than switching to a
different network.

