Hi seoincorporation,

What you see happening in Congress today and tomorrow is what they call "Kabuki theater".  The fact is that in 2017, Facebook ($11.5 million) spent more on legislative lobbying to Congress than all tech companies except for two: Google ($18 million), and Amazon ($12.8 million).  Congress can't be counted on to be reliable in much, but I am willing to state something that I believe to be absolute: Congress will not bite the hand that feeds them.  Also, contributions from corporate PACs (they all have them) to candidate and/or multicandidate PACs are not included in that number, it only represents Lobbying Disclosure Act filings.

They will bully Mr. Zuckerberg and make them look tough, and him squirming.  They will let him avoid the tough questions with an "I don't recall" or "I'll have to get back to you", etc.  Then six months from now, expect nothing to be done -- or even worse, legislation to come out that endorses in some way what Facebook does.

Before I go further, please do not make the mistake of believing it is only Facebook that does these things.  Go through your phone's apps and the permissions that they have (i.e. contacts, sensors, camera, read messages, etc.).  Facebook, Google Search, Bing, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter, Google Apps, Microsoft Outlook/Hotmail, WhatsApp, Kik, etc.  Pretty much every app and service makes use of the data you allow it to have to analyze and profile you.  Facebook is probably the worst offender for a few different reasons (type of information you explicitly provide to their platform, their aggressive apps and website widgets, and their huge appetite for integrating other sources of data, such as health records and credit reports, into their datasets), but they are not the only ones.

Facebook's business model depends on harvesting your data and using it to sell highly targeted advertising.  Want to target 25-year-old single men that live within 20 miles of a Texas Roadhouse restaurant and have interests in steak, grilling, barbeque, or other related topics?  No problem.  How about teenage mothers that seem to fit the profile of a girl/woman suffering from postpartum depression?  Easy peasy.  It's chilling how they've leveraged their dataset in combination with the disciplines of sociology, economics, and psychology to create a platform that can be used to influence thinking in nearly a weaponized fashion.

Given that current social media platforms depend on this type of data in order to sell ads that have high conversions, new platforms are really the only solution.  Is anyone really going to trust Facebook if tomorrow they say, "sorry, we tracked the average time you spent in the restroom, but we're not going to do that anymore".  Highly doubtful, I certainly wouldn't believe it.  Not unless Facebook was open source and I could prove they were running only that code, which is impossible.

My vision of future open platforms are ones that do not make as much money as Facebook because they do not profile people.  You can still sell advertising, indeed you have to find a way to pay the bills (just as they do here on the Bitcoin Forum), but you won't be able to command the same price as highly targeted ads.  You might be able to allow users to opt-in to some general demographic information so that, for example, men's products are shown to men and women's products to women.  I don't know, but I believe all sharing should be opt-in, with the platform completely locked down by default.  Corporate tendencies are precisely the opposite, but I believe user privacy must come first on social media services.  You must be able to both (a) ensure user control over privacy and use of their content and (b) still make a viable business model.

One of the projects we have in our incubation program is going to be a fully open-source social media platform that will eventually have services analogous to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Periscope.  You are going up against huge, many billion dollar industries and corporations, it's not an easy accomplishment.  Funding sources are more limited.  Just incubating our project to a robust MVP is going to take time and money.  But I strongly believe in strong-encryption, decentralized/peer-to-peer sharing, and censorship-proof (probably resistant, nothing is impossible) platforms.  In theory, any user could set up their own server and be the primary seed for their own content.  Not everyone will choose to do this, so some centralized infrastructure is needed, especially early on.  Some users (such as professional content creators, aka YouTube personalities, news organizations, etc.) will decide to run their own servers, thereby increasing the resilience of the network for everyone.  Advertising is one source of revenue, but completing distributed computing in the background is another source that I'm very interested in pursuing.  Subscriptions can also work, though most people don't want to pay subscriptions.  There are other opportunities to create revenue streams that are not based on shady profiling and tracking.

Ultimately, I think that social and other decentralized services will benefit from devices like the Bitseeds for Bitcoin nodes.  I imagine an appliance device that is "set it and forget it", and you can opt-in to the services you want to participate in and the system will automatically operate nodes for those services.  It has to be made as easy as a smartphone app to use, maybe have some advanced mode tweaking for people like us.  I could see someone purchasing a device like that if they received a benefit they don't now have.  Like a Kodi box but doing lots behind the scenes that the average user doesn't need to worry about.  People could choose to build their own, but many will just choose to buy a plug and play solution.

Social media, and other services, have abused the trust of their users for a long time.  New services are needed that purposely build in barriers to prevent that and are transparent and open-source.

Best regards,
Ben