By now you’ve probably heard the news about private Facebook data being used to target American voters by Cambridge Analytica. If not, read it now:
Are you surprised?
We can all act surprised and outraged, but the truth of the matter is, we knew what Facebook’s business model was, and continued to participate anyway.
Very few of us were willing to consider a service that wasn’t free, and even fewer thought about the second order consequences of allowing Facebook to sell our private data to anyone with money.
I’ve had some uneasiness about Facebook’s business model and their constant tracking for years, which caused me to post significantly less about my personal life to it than I would have if I trusted the company with that data.
But I always stopped short of completely deleting my account because network effects are incredibly powerful.
It’s hard to walk away from the only network where I can share my wedding photos with both my family on the east coast of the US and my husband’s family in rural India. It’s hard to delete Instagram and not share your wonderful travels with your friends when all of your friends are sharing their lives constantly there. If you don’t see their posts, you’re missing out. If you don’t post, it feels to them like you have disappeared.
But the time has come to take a big step back and give our social networks and their business models a good, hard look.
These last few months I’ve been dreaming up something different. I’ve only just started building it, but I want to get it out there in front of the world and get feedback as soon as possible. My goal is to build a social app that enhances our real-world connections and friendships, not one that pulls us further apart by provoking our divisions and anxieties. It will be a service that charges money; its users will be the customers rather than the product sold to other companies. There will be no ads, because online advertisers demand far too much access to user information and personal details. It will focus on time well-spent instead of encouraging you to be hopelessly addicted to it.
Sound interesting?
Check out my landing page and sign up to receive updates on its release.
I will be sending out a survey about what you want from a social network soon, so this is a great chance to give input on what gets built.
If we want to fix these problems, we must build better systems. So I am. I hope you’ll join me on this journey.
