[DyslexicAtheist]

not a single day goes by without the company taking a crap in some corner.

my proposal is more radical. rally to ban FB in that country. incentivize local companies to come up with alternative solutions.

zuck and his comrades have no business poking their noses into foreigners medical data anyway. it would also avoid less taxes being lost on facebooks Double Irish tax evasion. treat them like the cancer they are. don't celebrate FB engineers and call them out for the useful idiots they are.

[golergka]

> incentivize local companies to come up with alternative solutions.

Living in a country where local social networks are more popular with general population than foreign ones (Russia), I'd rather prefer FAANG. "Local companies" may sound good because the word "local" has some nice connotations, like your "local store" or "local coffee shop". But in reality, "local companies" do all the bad stuff that Facebook does, and also go above and beyond to cooperate with the state against the protesters or any political dissidents. And they're also not as good at writing software, so these networks have significantly worse design and a lot more bugs.

There are millions of example where people want to solve a problem, think that they will be able to do it with government regulation, and end up with a situation that is much worse. But even among them, this is a case where it could only make situation worse. And much, much worse.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

We don't need local solutions, we need FOSS solutions so everyone can see exactly what's going on.

[golergka]

To "see exactly what's going on", you would need to be sure of what's happening on the server, and I don't know how to do that for sure except for the blockchain.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, let's stick to the better one of the bad choices we have.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

You're making a good point. We can, however, write software that makes certain guarantees on the client side. If I'm the only one with the encryption keys, does it really matter what the server does?

This is the basic idea behind zero-knowledge systems using homomorphic encryption to do very cool things.

[DyslexicAtheist]

fair point i think

[laurent92]

Or ban it from iPhone for one or two versions so they stop this one tracking. Then repeat often enough that people start thinking it is uncertain that FB/WA be available, and don’t require WA to book a doctor’s appointment.