[williamjames]

You speak exactly of the problem: Having outside service providers. When you have an outside service provider you are now, and will always be, dependent upon the service provider. The only solution is to not use service providers and to distribute your own data (as you have described). When you distribute your own data, you can have nightly encryption key updates sent to all of the friends you trust. If you remove a friend from your list, they do not get the nightly key update and no longer have access to your information. What I describe in my article that I published on Saturday is that we are not at the point yet where completely distributing all of your own content created by you is plausible. The use of third party "service" providers is simply a necessary (for some people) thing in this transition period.

Here is the article I speak of: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=williamjames