Facebook Diaspora

Recently, some serious privacy issues about Facebook were raised in the media, all of which are valid concerns.  Trusting your personal data to a third party that stands to profit and benefit otherwise from, is generally not a good idea.  Corporations worship one thing: profit.  Facebook will sell you out to maximize its own profit.  Therefore, some inventive, recent Computer Science grads cooked up a scheme called Diaspora, a fully open sourced, distributed computing, social networking platform in which the individual retains full control of his or her data.  What’s more, in a matter of a few short weeks they have managed to raise 170,000.00 dollars.  Obviously, this hints at a lot more to come and some serious shakeup in the social-networking arena.

Aptly named, Diaspora, the project seems to hint (almost with a sinister smile) at a mass emigration from Facebook to this new style of social networking.  In this new style, the user installs the Diaspora Web and Application Server on his or her computer.  All data and transactions are encrypted (protected) with GPG, a free/open source version of PGP and fully compatible with the latter.  While this software platform is still under development, in its release form, it will include a simple wizard setup and all of the user friendly bells and whistles our Facebook emigres would expect.   Most importantly, all of your data is stored on your computer, not some major corporation’s servers.  If you want to take down your information or severely limit it, you can do it. So, how does this work you ask …..

When browsing Diaspora, you would go to whatever their address will be, ostensibly it will be like diaspora.com.  Diaspora.com would simply be the hub server: basically it contains a link to the computer that has the information you want to view.  With Diaspora, your computer becomes a spoke on the hub.  This system is known as distributed, decentralized computing.   This is quite the opposite of Facebook which embraces cloud computing, or all computing being done over the internet, on their servers.

If you are interested in learning more, as any thinking, privacy-concerned American should, please go to http://joindiaspora.com.  Diaspora is putting control of your data back into your hands.

Posted by maschwar on May 17, 2010. Filed under Opinion Editorial,Science and Tech,WorldNewsVine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.