Yes, the “freedom as capability” aspect is important to me and, from that view, the man in the middle is dangerous because relying on him keeps you ignorant and dependent. The costs of dependence are not always obvious up front, which is actually why I agree with your comparison to the phone system. AT&T wouldn’t have been able to turn all our phone records over to the NSA if we had been routing those calls through our friends. We had to build the copper phone network through intermediaries then, but we don’t have to build our digital communications networks like that today. It is an unnecessary dependence, which makes the impact on our freedom more important.

Beyond the freedom and independence aspects of the situation, we need to be concerned about the social and legal controls over the systems. As I mention somewhat in Privacy’s Ghost piece and in the Friend-to-Friend Network one, our existing social and legal mechanisms just don’t work for controlling the behavior of people running social networks. So we can’t just regard social network operators as normal participants in communications that we can trust or doubt on an even footing with everyone else in our lives. These operators are effectively unchecked by social constraints, which makes letting them into our lives dangerous.

While my social network may be compromised because Ian is a horrible bearded monster, that’s just part of having him in my circle.

If I have to trust Mark Zuckerberg to deal with Ian, I now have to worry about Mark’s motives. I know how I’m paying for my server, and how Ian pays for his. Zuckerberg has a different lifestyle – he might, for example, allow unsavory third parties to offer services and give them free rein over my information.

I also think Ian’s point about maturity and literacy is a good one. Being able to type quickly used to be a specialized skill, like these skills are now. Right now, you’re saying “It’s easier for me to just let the priests tell me what god wants and for them to learn to read the book.” Ian is trying to make you more free – he wants you to be able to read the book and be able to make decisions about what you believe and who you trust.

Just getting around to reading some of your blog posts. A couple of thoughts.

- What exactly is wrong with having a “man” in the center running a social network? How is this different, for instance, from the phone company? In one of your recent posts, you talk fairly abstractly about the dangers associated with the loss of privacy, but I’m still not sure what exactly those dangers are. Obviously one needs to be sensitive to the nature of different online forums – for instance, Facebook is a quasi-public space, and one should expect that strangers may view whatever information you post there. But assuming I understand that (and I do) what potential bad outcome is there that I need to be frightened of? I don’t find the notion that large corporations have access to quasi-private information about me particularly disturbing. Large (and potentially corrupt) institutions have always had access to lots of information about me – hospitals, insurance companies, schools, universities, the IRS, etc. It strikes me as just part of the cost of modern life.

- You write “We got the centralized, intermediated tools that we have now mostly because the people designing them thought of us as children who could never learn to run our own.” I’m not sure if that’s right. There are all kins of tools and communities available online, with varying levels of ease-of-use, personal control, etc. The problem isn’t on the supply side – it’s on the demand side. People just prefer simple, easy to use tools. I think I’m probably on the right tail of the technological sophistication curve. But when I read your description of a DNS based Facebook alternative, I think: “I’d rather just use Facebook – the ease of effort more than makes up for some loss of privacy/control.” And if I think that, many of the people who I want to connect to via social networking (who are less technologically sophisticated than I am) are certainly going to think that.

Of course, that’s not to say that it’s impossible to imagine a gradual cultural evolution towards more empowering technology, particularly if it can be achieved without sacrificing ease of use. But I don’t think it’s going to just happen out of nowhere – people are going to need a good reason to switch. And (see my first point above), I’m not totally clear what that good reason is.

Interested to hear your thoughts…

Greg