[billybob]

Best quote: "The problem is caused by people who would like a little help spying on their friends. And in a genteel way, that’s what the social media offers. They get to surveil other people. In return for a little bit of the product, they assist the growth of these immense commercial spying operations."

This has become the crux of my objection to social networks: they exist to gather data on you. Whatever benefit you get from it, their purpose of existence is data mining.

As the Pinboard Blog puts it, that's ANTI-social.

"We're used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it's worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?"

http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/

[bproper]

Too bad we can't exchange that for a system where social networks let you own the data and charge a monthly subscription fee.

[BHSPitMonkey]

Diaspora lets you own the data, and it's free. If you wanted to run your own node on a dedicated server rented at a hosting company, you could do that too.