[kevintwohy]

Hate to be the downer, but the problem with this is that people don't really care about privacy. The NYTimes and every other mainstream news publication has been running this exact same story for five years: "New edgy upstart ______ is aiming to be the antidote to FB/Twitter oversharing by introducing innovative privacy controls..."

Most, if not all, of those services have seen a brief flurry of activity before eventually withering and dying. People don't truly care about privacy -- they like the idea of their privacy being important, in theory. No combination of new features, openness, or distributed systems is going to be able to overcome the fact that people largely only care about two things when it comes to social networking: being on the network that the most of their friends are on, and having their stuff seen by the most amount of people possible.

If you ask, people will tell you until they're breathless that privacy is important to them -- but almost no one will ever touch the robust privacy controls they asked for.

[sp332]

Rasing >$20,000 in 2 weeks says someone cares about privacy.

[doron]

People keep saying this, but i don't think it is true. People do care about privacy quite allot, many will lower the shades when they undress, not all of them speak about their sexual identity for instance, a good number of people are nervous about the census, or get worried about NSA wiretapping.

What seems to be the case is that people are largely unaware what kind of data collection mechanisms are in place.

There is a growing concern, and it is not just facebook, it is very distressing to people when they find that their gmail\yahoo\whatever has been hacked and "they" ware sending Viagra ads to all their friends and colleagues.

I often meet people burned in such manner, and their attitude about online security changed dramatically, often without guidance they do not know how to approach the problem.

In addition the interface always gives a sense of security by abstracting your communication with other people.

There is a great market potential for a private by default.

[ElbertF]

The average user may not think about privacy that much but when ex-husbands start responding to pictures of their kids I'm sure even most house wives will start looking for an alternative (and spread the word like wild fire). Give it a couple of years and Oprah will be deleting her account on live TV. Twitter was geek-only for years until they suddenly went main-stream.