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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?> <!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>unlike-us-reader-29</title> <link href="css/unlike-us-reader.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body id="unlike-us-reader" xml:lang="en-GB"> <div> <h1 id="toc_marker-28" class="article-title"><a id="Facebook-vs.-Diaspora---a-Critical-Study" />Facebook vs. Diaspora: a Critical Study</h1> <p class="slash">/</p> <h2 class="author-name"><a href="unlike-us-reader-34.xhtml#sevignani">004380032</a></h2> </div> <div> <p class="quote_no-space-after"><em>I donated. I think it is a cool idea. [...] It’s just their approach that the world could be better and saying, “We should try to do it.”</em></p> <p class="quote">– Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook Inc.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-1-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-1">1</a></sup></p> <p>In an interview with <em>Wired</em> magazine, Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Executive Officer of Facebook, Inc., the world’s largest social networking site (SNS) and one of the most visited web pages on the globe,<sup><a id="footnote-311043-2-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-2">2</a></sup> revealed that he has financially supported the development of Diaspora, an alternative, non-commercial SNS.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-3-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-3">3</a></sup> Mr. Zuckerberg is right in supporting alternative SNS. We should contribute to alternatives, such as Diaspora, in ways that are suitable for us, ranging from developing code and donating money, to simply using alternative SNS and helping make them known. The theoretical discussion that follows is based on empirical data gained in a qualitative interview study that was part of the three-year research project ‘Social networking sites in the surveillance society’<sup><a id="footnote-311043-4-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-4">4</a></sup> and reveals that Facebook and other commercial SNS exploit their users and contribute to their alienation from their own achievements, themselves and other users structurally. Diaspora and other non-commercial SNS are meaningful alternatives and worth support from a perspective that ultimately wants to overcome exploitation and alienation. <strong class="char-style-override-1"></strong></p> <h3 class="text_subtitle">A Comparison Between Facebook and Diaspora</h3> <p>Commercial SNS are steadily under pressure to gain profits. This became notable once again when Facebook published its business plans and figures in the course of its stock market launch<sup><a id="footnote-311043-5-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-5">5</a></sup> in February 2012. For instance, within these documents Facebook points to the increase of mobile access to its platform and promises shareholders it will heighten efforts to implement monetization strategies for its mobile users. Obviously the status quo situation and the status quo revenues are insufficient for Facebook and its potential investors; it plans therefore to also extend advertising to its users’ mobile phones and to introduce targeted advertising ubiquitously. </p> <p>How do commercial SNS, such as Facebook, make profit? Several critical media scholars have stressed that exploitation processes lie at the bottom of commercial media and SNS.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-6-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-6">6</a></sup> Most generally, exploitation is the structural appropriation of societaly-produced surplus: one societal group profits more from the achievements of another group than the latter group itself is able to profit from their own achievements.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-7-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-7">7</a></sup> This is only possible, when ‘a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labor’<sup><a id="footnote-311043-8-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-8">8</a></sup> is established. Facebook consequently is not owned by users, but owned by a small circle including Zuckerberg, banks, investors, stockholders, and so on. Exploitation is a major root of social inequality and the unequal distribution of opportunities in capitalism; exploitation causes and maintains the difference between the poor and the rich and reproduces the fact that on average the rich have more and better opportunities to realize a fulfilled life than the poor. </p> <p>People are not only using social networking sites but are also producing something that is appropriated by the SNS’s owners and sold to others in order to realize profit. Therefore we can speak about users as <em>prosumers</em>, a portmanteau of producer and consumer.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-9-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-9">9</a></sup> The SNS owner buys technical infrastructure, such as server parks and software components, as well as a labor force, like accountants, software developers, etc., and produces the SNS on which users can interact. While people use the site for different reasons, such as getting news, providing information, staying in touch with friends, making new relations, or organizing events, they produce a wide range of data. In this way, they are watched very accurately by the owners of SNS. Profit-oriented SNS develop massive systems of user surveillance and store ‘literally everything’, as a Facebook employee has admitted.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-10-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-10">10</a></sup> This puts the SNS owner in position to appropriate the data product that is generated by the users, and to sell it to the advertising industry. The advertising industry is very interested because Facebook’s prosumer commodity enables them to place their adverts in a more targeted and efficient manner. In comparison to traditional TV broadcasters, for instance, who have a less clear image about their audience, Facebook can target detailed segments; scattering losses for the advertising industry are avoided. When our mobile phones are increasingly becoming advertising pillars, as Facebook has announced, we now know this has something to do with the appropriation of user-generated products and therefore the exploitation of users.</p> <p>Exploitation is interwoven with another ethical key concept of critical theory, namely alienation.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-11-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-11">11</a></sup> According to Marx, alienation is given in capitalism as workers, or prosumers in the context of Facebook, cannot self-determine the circumstances of the realization of their labor force, and therefore cannot recognize themselves in their work and the products they have made. Marx speaks about four forms of alienation<sup><a id="footnote-311043-12-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-12">12</a></sup>: first, the producer is alienated from her/his product (product alienation); s/he has no control over the things that s/he is producing. On Facebook, users produce a wide range of data and engage in interactions, the control over this data, however, lies with the owners of Facebook and not with the prosumers. Second, the worker/user is alienated from the processes in which s/he produces things (process alienation). On Facebook, the owners of the SNS control the production side. For instance, Facebook decides which messages appear to the users and shapes or co-determines the interactions on the site. Marx then speaks of the consequences of this alienated laboring for the self (self-alienation) and for society (societal alienation). Self-alienation and societal alienation, broadly speaking, means that in capitalism, man-made things exercise force over man<sup><a id="footnote-311043-13-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-13">13</a></sup> and constrain people’s freedom. That is, that the individual is other-directed and not in control over his or her life, on the one hand, and on the other, that individuals together are societaly alienated if they cannot consciously shape the society in which they would like to live. Users’ own labor, their interactions, communications, and cooperation on SNS are exercising force over them: the more users participate in Facebook, the more powerful and profitable Facebook becomes due to prosumer exploitation, hence, the more it is able to monopolize and concentrate the means of communication and cooperation in the internet, the less it is bound to the common good and the more it can enforce its owners’ private interests against the individual user and ultimately against all users together. An example would be that Facebook is able to dictate complex, confusing, and lax privacy policies, and present its users with sink or swim opportunities to accept them or be excluded from the world’s biggest social networking site. </p> <p>Exploitation and alienation are not only analytical concepts but also imply the goal of their abolition. On the way to this goal is one important strategy, and while this is not the only one and is probably not sufficient, it is supporting alternative, non-commercial SNS. Diaspora gained some attention in this context, not only because Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated to it. In 2010, four young New York university students were listening to a speech by law professor and free software foundation advocate, Eben Moglen, titled ‘Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing’.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-14-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-14">14</a></sup> Moglen, also known as the author of the dotCommunist Manifesto,<sup><a id="footnote-311043-15-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-15">15</a></sup> where he, inspired by Marx, propagates a contradiction between free information and multi-national capitalism in the age of the internet, describes in his speech the surveillance-based heteronomy that users face within an internet controlled by large corporate monopolists. Corporations, such as Facebook and Google, are able to dictate ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ terms and provide users with a dubious but working privacy-threatening deal: ‘I will give you free web hosting and some PHP [personal home page tools] doodads and you get spying for free all the time’.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-16-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-16">16</a></sup> Moglen challenges the status quo by stressing that the situation need not be the way it currently is. Technological means that are currently available, he points out, provide us with a potential alternative to an internet controlled by powerful centers. He calls upon his audience: </p> <p class="quote">We’re technologists, we should fix it [...] You know every day that goes by there’s more data we’ll never get back. Every day that goes by there’s more data inferences we can’t undo. Every day that goes by we pile up more stuff in the hands of the people who got too much.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-17-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-17">17</a></sup></p> <p>The four students were inspired by Moglen’s call, and started developing Diaspora that soon and perhaps too soon was celebrated as the potential Facebook-killer. The euphoria came, on the one hand, from Diaspora’s quick success in fundraising: via an internet platform, they were able to raise 200,000 USD to get their project running. On the other hand, Facebook has faced several privacy problems as well as growing user discontent. </p> <p>By now, Diaspora has been released to a broader public and has about 380,000 users.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-18-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-18">18</a></sup> It has ensured itself further funding, and has built up an organizational structure, but the software is still in its alpha phase and remains a work in progress. Apart from Diaspora’s early stage of development, it looks similar and provides features akin to those of well-known commercial SNS. In fact, it provided some functionalities first that have then been adopted by commercial SNS. In August 2012, the founders of Diaspora announced that in a step-by-step fashion they plan to hand over complete control of the further development of the software to the community. This step gives more evidence that Diaspora is and will remain an alternative SNS project. </p> <p>Not only is Diaspora an alternative to existing SNS in terms of its funding, it also differs fundamentally in its infrastructure and how it is produced. It is useful to distinguish here between two levels. One is the code level, where we are interested in how Diaspora’s software is produced, what the means to produce SNS look like, and in which social relations they are embedded. The other level is that of the user, where the use value of Diaspora, such as its ability to satisfy users’ needs, according to privacy for instance, is of interest. We will see that the code level interacts with the user level in a manner quite alternative to Facebook.</p> <p>Let us start with the code level. In the information economy, the traditional business strategy to make profit is to close the source code of any program. This means that others are excluded, on behalf of private property rights, from copying and modifying the software. SNS production is, to a large extent, informational production. As it is widely known for the music and video industry, with the free circulation of media content on the web, and the criminalization of those who download it, informational goods come potentially into conflict with capital interests for the following reasons<sup><a id="footnote-311043-19-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-19">19</a></sup>:</p> <ul> <li class="unordered-list"><span class="bullet">-</span> Information is produced and diffused by networks. </li> <li class="unordered-list"><span class="bullet">-</span> Information is hard to control in terms of accessibility and ownership.</li> <li class="unordered-list-last"><span class="bullet">-</span> As information is intangible, it can easily be copied and owned by many, which consequently undermines individual private property. </li> </ul> <p>Facebook nevertheless enacts exclusion from the means to produce the SNS. It owns the operating software code to run its platform and also holds property rights in the database about its users’ interactions. </p> <p>The situation is different with Diaspora. It’s mode of production, which can be called ‘peer production’,<sup><a id="footnote-311043-20-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-20">20</a></sup> is able to accommodate the new qualities of informational production. Peer production is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals who come together to develop and create a shared and desired outcome. Instead of being exchanged, outcomes and inputs of the working process are shared in the Diaspora developer community. Contributors to the code really own the conditions for the realization of their programming, thereby ensuring that work and the realization of their work cannot be torn apart and alienated from each other. </p> <p>Karl Marx argues that: </p> <p class="quote">At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they had been at work before.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-21-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-21">21</a></sup></p> <p>In today’s information economy we can observe the truth in Marx’s argument; the Diaspora project is a concretization of the conflict he speaks of. The relations of production are those of peer production and in terms of property relations, Diaspora is licensed under the GNU’s Affero General Public License (AGPL). This license for software code, which is provided by the Free Software Foundation, follows a principle called ‘copyleft’. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, describes how copyleft works:</p> <p class="quote">I make my code available for use in free software, and not for use in proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write software to make it free as well. I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code<em>.</em><sup><a id="footnote-311043-22-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-22">22</a></sup><em> </em></p> <p>Copyleft uses existing property regimes to subvert them, and uses the power of the right to property to avoid exclusive appropriation of software code.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-23-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-23">23</a></sup> It can be understood as a self-protecting measure for peer production and as an expression of the conflict between technological developments, social relations within which it is produced in the information economy, and society’s legal institutions to secure certain modes of production. It is self-protecting for it requires any adaption of the free software code to again be presented as free software and licensed under the copyleft principle. This clearly runs contrary to Facebook’s model of excluding others from access to the operating SNS software and the aggregated user data, in order to make profit. Copyleft production suspends the capitalist logic where it is employed. There is then no more separation between prosumers and the ownership of the SNS. Prosumers can – if they are skilled enough – even participate in further developing the software and improving it.</p> <p>One may correctly argue that SNS not only consist of information aspects, such as software; there is also material infrastructure, like server parks, that is necessary to run SNS, and here the copyleft does not apply. As with Diaspora, the software is not exclusively owned and controlled as users can become productive in a third way: they can run their own servers with the free Diaspora software installed (Diaspora calls this a ‘pod’), and this way, they can contribute to a decentralization of the SNS. Unlike Facebook that processes user data in huge server parks, Diaspora consists of a potentially unlimited number of interoperating servers that are locally distributed and not controlled by a single organization. This means that uploaded user data are not stored and managed centrally. Theoretically, it is possible for everyone to operate such a pod. An alternative to setting one’s own pod is that the software allows users to migrate from non-trustworthy pods to trustworthy ones. If the single user does not run their own pod and is not the SNS provider at the same time, Diaspora still hands over the control to users, and frees them from the dependency of powerful centers that use their data for advertising purposes, for instance. </p> <p>Therefore, the Diaspora project should be seen in the context of initiatives that seek to empower users to run personal, self-controlled servers easily. For instance, the Freedom Box initiative describes itself as ‘a project that combines the computing power of a smart phone with your wireless router to create a network of personal servers to protect privacy during daily life’.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-24-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-24">24</a></sup> <em></em></p> <p>Currently, there are a limited number of pods<sup><a id="footnote-311043-25-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-25">25</a></sup>; as such, Diaspora is not yet distributed widely. Nevertheless, the principle behind Diaspora is aimed at this direction as they say: ‘Get started on a community pod and then move all of your social data to a pod you control. Diaspora’s distributed design means that you will never have to sacrifice control of your data’.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-26-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-26">26</a></sup> The effect of this structure is that ‘as soon as it becomes public that a company is exploiting the data of the users of its pod, they move away and the company is dead (in that sector). So the product shifts from you being the product to the software being the product’.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-27-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-27">27</a></sup> </p> <p>We can now see how the code level affects the user level and enables greater user control and self-determination. In fact Diaspora avoids user exploitation and alienation: </p> <p class="quote">Yet our distributed design means <em>no big corporation will ever control Diaspora</em>. Diaspora will never sell your social life to advertisers, and you won’t have to conform to someone’s arbitrary rules or look over your shoulder before you speak.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-28-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-28">28</a></sup> </p> <p>In comparison to Facebook, the alternative SNS Diaspora is a progressive, capitalist commodity production-transcending outcome of the contradictions between developing material forces of production and capitalist social relations within which they are embedded. </p> <h3 class="text_subtitle">Users’ Need for Alternative SNS</h3> <p>One may ask, what do critical theories of exploitation and alienation have to do with the concrete usage of SNS? Aren’t exploitation and alienation philosophical concepts that are too abstract to have any relevance? In our research project we conducted a study, and in interviews with users, found concrete empirical evidence for both concepts. </p> <p>We assume that one aspect of feeling exploited is that users are kind of aware that people who own and control the SNS are appropriating societaly-produced surplus, and those interviewees therefore want compensation in return. Because we perceive SNS users as prosumers we can say that ‘nobody is unproductive since each human being is producing and reproducing the commons appropriated by capital’ and ‘capital should in return give something back to society’.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-29-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-29">29</a></sup> We mainly identified one influential line of argumentation among those users who want compensation: interviewees see a bad or exploitative ratio between the SNS’s profits and their own benefits of using the SNS. Interviewee 12 expressed this clearly: <em></em></p> <p class="quote">Facebook is earning so much money; therefore it is my opinion that one should receive something extra to using the site for free.</p> <p>When criticizing exploitation, critical theorists not only disparage the extent of exploitation but also its preconditions, i.e. the right to have others work for you and the private control over the means to realize the work force (which is traditionally the private property in the means of production). Within this strand of criticism, alternative SNS with alternative preconditions become crucial. To only moan a bad ratio between SNS profits and the received advantages is based on a limited understanding of exploitation. Exploitation remains exploitation even when compensation is paid to the user in return. However the call for compensation, which we have found among eight of our interviewees, shows that a feeling of being exploited on SNS exists. From a critical point of view, compensation payments are progressive as they support the exploited and would limit the power of capital at the same time. In the context of an advanced critique of exploitation, we found an interesting argument among those who do not want compensation in exchange for the usage of their data. Interviewees argue that personal data should not be traded at all and that receiving compensation will not stop this; any compensation payment is based on such trading. For instance, interviewee 24 argued that it is not acceptable to trade personal data, </p> <p class="quote">[...] because my privacy means a lot to me and I think it cannot be compensated with material goods. Privacy is about my decision and my freedom so that I do not lose my self-control. They should not [be allowed to] exercise so much power over me. </p> <p>Interviewee 9 is in line with this thinking when s/he argues that this would ‘basically be a form of selling myself’, and adds, </p> <p class="quote">Of course, in principle, right now I’m also selling me, however without receiving money in exchange. If one would really receive money then this would perhaps shed more light on the fact that they really take something from you [...] currently it is not recognizable. </p> <p>Interviewee 25 argues: ‘I believe such things [...] information should not be for sale [...] In fact, I would then sell my privacy. I wouldn’t do that, but maybe there are people that want to make such easy pickings’. Interviewee 27 contrasts these ‘easy pickings’ with ‘honestly earned money that s/he prefers. These interviewees resist something that Facebook constantly does in its practice. Campell and Carlson call it the ‘reconceptualization of privacy in the consumer’s mind from a right or civil liberty to a commodity that can be exchanged for perceived benefits’.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-30-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-30">30</a></sup> Privacy, either in theory or in practice, is no longer perceived as a human right but as an alienable good that can be exchanged for money or other benefits. It is crucial to see that exploitation on SNS would not work if privacy was not for sale.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-31-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-31">31</a></sup> </p> <p>We also found some evidence of prosumer alienation in our interviews that particularly concerns trade-off strategies between privacy needs and perceived user benefits, which users typically employ when they participate in SNS. Ellison et al. have conducted a study about trade-off strategies that SNS users employ in order to balance the tension between privacy needs, on the one hand, and benefits that are generated through SNS usage, on the other.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-32-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-32">32</a></sup> They describe three strategies for managing audiences: adjusting friending behaviors, which is to consciously reflect on which relationships are accepted on SNS; making privacy settings, the regulation of who can see what information; and limiting information disclosure, considered the lowest common denominator strategy for users where the only information released is that which is seen as appropriate for all potential audiences on the SNS. Contrary to the study at hand, Ellison et al. do not take into account institutional and economic surveillance, and privacy threats. Therefore their observed strategies cannot simply be adapted for our purposes. The strategy of adjusting friending behavior does not affect the economic surveillance threat that comes from the commercial SNS provider. As users cannot regulate surveillance for advertising purposes effectively by adjusting privacy settings, and Facebook is in any case able to collect and process user data regardless of user privacy setting choices, this strategy is of limited relevance in our study. The only thing SNS users can do is to limit their information disclosure, no matter if they are SNS literate or not. Indeed we found this strategy the most influential among our interviewees. It helps them reach a point where they say that the benefits of SNS outweigh the surveillance and privacy threats clearly. However, this strategy has the disadvantage that it may also limit the value of social networking for the user. A further, but rarely employed, trade-off strategy that we found in our interviews can be termed as ‘subversive usage’. Interviewees are making false statements, using pseudonyms or separate email addresses, and propagating critical, ‘subversive’ information about the SNS on the SNS. Subversive information, for instance, is information about effective privacy protection opportunities and existing alternative SNS shared by the users on Facebook. Some of our interviewees are using browser applications that block advertisements and make them invisible to them. We interpret this closely connected to the subversive trade-off strategy. Subversive strategies, in our view, are a marker of user alienation.</p> <p>Another interesting point that arose is that interviewees shared several reflections about the conditions of their trade-off strategies. Besides pointing to the dynamic nature of their trade-offs (for instance, that their trade-offs will change when their life situation changes), a third of our sample argued that there is a kind of heteronomy that determines the outcome of their assessments. What do interviewees mean with heteronomy? First, they stated that they have a lack of knowledge about how their data is exactly processed and that there was no informed consent in agreeing to the terms of use and privacy policy. Second, interviewees see a sort of dependency on Facebook. They said that it is simply impossible to waive all the social contacts and relations because it would denote a social exclusion for them. Third, interviewees feel powerless because there is only an in or an out, and no real opportunity to make differentiated decisions, such as an opt-out opportunity for advertising. In their view, SNS, such as Facebook, also put the burden of all responsibility for privacy protection on the user. Fourth, they argued that there is a lack of alternatives to Facebook’s monopoly. Fifth and finally, we observed a kind of fatalism among the interviewees that can be interpreted as an experience of heteronomy too. In this context interviewees argued, for instance, that nothing is for free in life, that the situation will always be like it currently is, and that they, as members of the internet generation, are simply used to giving up privacy and accepting surveillance. The opportunity to change the problematic situation with commercial SNS does not come to their mind, although users own work, the interactions and data produced by them, is the precondition of how Facebook became that powerful – man made things exercise power over man.</p> <p>We can see the following results as a conclusion to our conversation about alienation:</p> <p>– First, there are clearly limitations to the decision-making freedom of SNS users. This becomes obvious when interviewees state that they have a lack of knowledge and as such have not given informed consent to the SNS terms of use. Several authors have outlined that SNS do not foster informed user content, but rather, they intentionally impede it.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-33-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-33">33</a></sup> This situation gives evidence of a first concrete form of alienation on SNS.</p> <p>– Second, SNS users may indeed be free to chose, but not free to determine the spectrum of potential decisions. Empirical evidence for this form of alienation is given when users point to a loss of the ‘social’ in social networking, for instance, when advertisements automatically pop up on users’ walls where they usually receive information about friends. Users only have ‘sink or swim’ opportunities regarding the acceptance of terms of use and potential changes, and also their acceptance of advertising and economic surveillance. The limited disclosure strategy is notable here. In fact, it means that users are forced to relinquish some social benefits that are inherent to SNS.</p> <p>– Third, there are also indirect forms of limiting users’ freedom on SNS that are harder to access empirically. Users voluntarily adopt views and forms of behavior that contribute to their further exploitation and alienation. We speculate that users’ fatalism and the very acceptance of the status quo situation could be expressions of alienated self-governance. Another aspect is that interviewees welcome targeted, surveillance-based advertising on SNS not only because they do not fear privacy invasion, but also because they think that targeted advertising provides useful information, and respects and takes their needs seriously. Those users lack, or have skewed awareness of, the problematic implications of surveillance, such as discrimination and social sorting, lack of democracy and transparency, power concentration, limitations of freedoms and alienation, as well as commercialization, exploitation, and structural social inequality.<sup><a id="footnote-311043-34-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-311043-34">34</a></sup> Contrary to this view we can point to the strong line of argumentation about the manipulating effects of (targeted) advertisements on SNS, which were also notable among our interviewees.<strong class="char-style-override-1"></strong></p> <h3 class="text_subtitle">Attitudes Towards Alternative SNS</h3> <p>Although Diaspora received some attention and media coverage, particularly because Facebook faced and continues to face public outcries regarding their irrespective behavior towards privacy, due to the strong monopoly position of Facebook and Google it was hard to find interviewees that were familiar with these kinds of alternatives. General knowledge about alternative SNS, which is mirrored in our sample, was absent or nearly absent. As alternative SNS are mostly unknown and seldom used we provided users with information about existing alternative, non-commercial SNS, Diaspora and kaioo in particular, and asked them what they thought about these.</p> <p>It is salient that all interviewees expressed a supportive attitude towards the introduced alternative SNS. The arguments of why interviewees support these are the following: first, users think that they embody the real network idea, which surrounds social relationships and community-building, instead of other purposes like gaining profit; second, interviewees were supportive because alternative SNS avoid the abuse of personal data and potential state surveillance; a third argument was that alternative SNS are non-commercial, free of advertising, and therefore do not need centralized power architecture; and fourth, these alternatives enable participation, self-organization, and self-determination (more) effectively than Facebook in the view of our interviewees. We were able to observe a close link between the arguments highlighting the non-commercial quality, the participation/self-determination aspect and those that point to the advantage of privacy protection. </p> <p>We were further able to differentiate between two forms of user support. One is support in a non-material way and one is monetary. Whereas all interviewees supported alternative SNS, at least in terms of an idea, nearly half of our sample (14 out of 30) replied positively to the question of whether they would also support alternatives monetarily. The amount of money they would spend varies between less or equal to 10 euros a year and more than 100 euros a year, where most of the supporters would pay less or equal to the 10 euros a year mark. Regarding monetary support for SNS, we could observe significant changes in attitudes once users became aware of, and informed about, the existence of alternative SNS: we asked our interviewees whether they would pay (directly or indirectly) for SNS, such as Facebook, if the sites would abandon (targeted) advertising, and most of them (17 out of 30) answered that they would not pay for it. Those who remain non-monetary supporters are in particular users who state that they find SNS not so important at all.</p> <p>Although all interviewees supported the introduced concepts of alternative SNS, most of them however expressed doubts or criticism (in particular those who supported alternative SNS theoretically but would not support them monetarily), or at least talked about their potential challenges (in particular those who would also support them monetarily). The first and most frequent challenge that interviewees see for alternative SNS is that the number of their user will be (remain) limited. People are not aware of the existing alternatives and only particularly ‘skilled’ users, such as informatics or ‘IT-nerds’, will contribute to the alternatives actively. On the other hand, there is a monopoly of Facebook that is based on network effects. The more users an SNS has, the more attractive it is for potential users. The second perceived challenge, presented often as an influential line of argumentation, was to question the sustainability of alternative SNS funding. Users think that donations are an insecure funding model. In a way, this argument is connected to the third line of argumentation: interviewees do not trust the non-commercial quality of the alternative SNS. They also cannot imagine that nobody will capitalize on the alternatives. They fear a ‘creeping’ or gradual commercialization once the SNS are grown. Interviewee 3 expressed, ‘It’s all about financing. In the beginning, I mean, also Facebook was relatively harmless and then it surely has gone worse as it has become so big’. Fourth, interviewees argued that new or different power structures will emerge on the alternatives. For instance, major donors or specialists will influence them. Fifth, interviewees feared that participation, self-organization, and self-determination will turn out to be only formal or superficial. In particular for Diaspora, interviewees see the challenge that real decentralization cannot be realized due to technical limitations, or they are unclear whether everybody will be able to run a personal server, a precondition of a real decentralized and distributed power structure on Diaspora. On the other hand, they mentioned that a real decentralized architecture may be disadvantageous because it provides less control over avoiding problematic or ‘dangerous’ content, insecurity, and irresponsibility.</p> <p>During the analysis of our interviews, we saw that there are two intensities of support for alternatives, a stronger supportive attitude that is expressed in the interviewee’s willingness to spend money for the alternative SNS, and a weaker form of support. We interpret that strong support for alternatives, both ideally and monetarily, stems from experiences of alienation and exploitation on SNS. The more weak form of support is notable among interviewees who show no interest in monetary giving, who have an overall confidence with the existing SNS and are employing, for instance, the weaker pluralism argument in order to express their support. Interviewee 15 is an example of a weak supportive attitude towards alternative SNS:</p> <p class="quote">I think that sounds well in principle, personally however, I find it not that bad that SNS are financed through advertising. We can take advantage from the fact that corporations are financing the SNS for us. I think that donation could be made for more meaningful projects. <em></em></p> <p>Likewise, the idea of weak support describes interviewee 20 who replies to the question of whether they see a necessity for alternative SNS, after they spent some time criticizing the introduced alternative SNS, with the answer: ‘Yes absolutely, am I contradictory? I think there should always be an alternative. There should be no monopoly, such as Facebook because then it can be abused’.</p> <p class="text-last">Weak supporters’ thoughts about the challenges faced by the introduced alternative SNS models tends to take on substantial doubt and criticism. This puts the possibilities and realities of these models into perspective, but does not withdraw the overall supportive attitude that we found for alternative SNS. Criticism should be taken as starting points to improve Diaspora and other existing alternatives. We think that users’ support for alternative, non-commercial SNS is ultimately grounded in their discontent with the consequences of online alienation and exploitation that they are currently facing.</p> <h6 class="references_title">References</h6> <p class="references">Andrejevic, Mark. ‘The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploration of Self-Disclosure’, <em>Critical Studies in Media Communication</em> 19.2 (2002).</p> <p class="references">______. ‘Social Network Exploitation’, in Zizi Papacharisi (ed.)<em> A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Networking Sites</em>, New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 82–101.</p> <p class="references">______. ‘Surveillance and Alienation in the Online Economy’, <em>Surveillance & Society</em> 8.3 (2012): 278–287.</p> <p class="references">Bauwens, Michel. ‘The Political Economy of Peer Production’, <em>Post-autistic Economics Review</em> 37 (2009): 33–44.</p> <p class="references">Benkler, Yochai. <em>The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom,</em> New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.</p> <p class="references">Bruns, Axel. <em>Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage</em>, New York: Peter Lang, 2008.</p> <p class="references">Campbell, John Edward and Matt Carlson. ‘Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy’, <em>Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media</em> 46.4 (2002): 586-606. </p> <p class="references">Comor, Edward. ‘Contextualizing and Critiquing the Fantastic Prosumer: Power, Alienation and Hegemony’, <em>Critical Sociology</em> 37.3 (2010): 309–327.</p> <p class="references">Diaspora. The Diaspora Project, <a href="http://diasporaproject.org/">http://diasporaproject.org/</a>.</p> <p class="references">Diaspora github wiki contributors. ‘Why client side encryption is a bad idea’, April 2012, <a href="https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Why-client-side-encryption-is-a-bad-idea/fafbd3a6d10e021d996dc6c93b7429c9b20c8675">https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Why-client-side-encryption-is-a-bad-idea/fafbd3a6d10e021d996dc6c93b7429c9b20c8675</a>, accessed November 2012.</p> <p class="references">‘Diaspora means a brighter future for all of us’. Diaspora <a href="http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/2011/09/21/diaspora-means-a-brighter-future-for-all-of-us.html">http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/2011/09/21/diaspora-means-a-brighter-future-for-all-of-us.html</a>, 21 September 2011.</p> <p class="references">Ebersman, David A. ‘Facebook, Inc Registration Statement on Form S-1’, Securities and Exchange Commission, 1 February 2012, <a href="http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm">http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm</a>.</p> <p class="references">______. ‘Facebook, Amendment No. 2 to Form S-1 Registration Statement’, Securities and Exchange Commission, 1 February, 2012, <a href="http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512101422/d287954ds1a.htm#toc287954_2">http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512101422/d287954ds1a.htm#toc287954_2</a>.</p> <p class="references">Ellison, Nicole B., Jessica Vitak, Charles Steinfield, Rebecca Gray and Cliff Lampe. ‘Negotiating Privacy Concerns and Social Capital Needs in a Social Media Environment’, in Sabine Trepte and Leonard Reinecke (eds)<em> Privacy Online: Perspectives on Privacy and Self-disclosure in the Social Web</em>, Berlin: Springer, 2011, pp. 19–32.</p> <p class="references">Fernback, Jan and Zizi Papacharisi. ‘Online Privacy as Legal Safeguard: The Relationship Among Consumer, Online Portal, and Privacy Policies’, <em>New Media & Society</em> 9.5 (2007): 715–734.</p> <p class="references">Freedom Box Foundation, flyer about the FreedomBox, <a href="http://freedomboxfoundation.org/doc/flyer.pdf">http://freedomboxfoundation.org/doc/flyer.pdf</a>.</p> <p class="references">Fuchs, Christian. ‘Labour in Informational Capitalism’, <em>The Information Society</em> 26.3 (2010): 176–196.</p> <p class="references">______. ‘Web 2.0, Prosumption, and Surveillance’, <em>Surveillance & Society</em> 8.3 (2011): 288–309.</p> <p class="references">______. ‘The Political Economy of Privacy on Facebook’, <em>Television & New Media </em>13.2 (2012): 139-159.</p> <p class="references">Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. <em>Vorlesungen zur Einführung ins ‘Kapital’</em>, Berlin: Argument, 2005.</p> <p class="references">de Laat, Paul B. ‘Copyright or Copyleft?: An Analysis of Property Regimes for Software Development’, <em>Research Policy</em> 34.10 (2005): 1511–1532.</p> <p class="references">Marx, Karl.<em> A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy</em>, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1909 (1859).<em></em></p> <p class="references">______. <em>Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume One,</em> Middlesex: Penguin, 1976 (1867).</p> <p class="references">______. ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’ in <em>Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto</em>, Amherst: Prometheus, 1988 (1944), pp. 13–168.</p> <p class="references">Moglen, Eben. The dotCommunist Manifesto, <a href="http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/dcm.html">http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/dcm.html</a>, 2003.</p> <p class="references">______. ‘Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing’, speech at a meeting of the Internet Society’s New York Branch, New York, 5 February 2010, transcript published at <a href="http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html">http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html</a>.</p> <p class="references">Sandoval, Marisol. ‘A Critical Empirical Case Study of Consumer Surveillance on Web 2.0’, in Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund and Marisol Sandoval (eds)<em> Internet and Surveillance: The Challenge of Web 2.0 and Social Media</em>, New York: Routledge, 2010.</p> <p class="references">Sevignani, Sebastian. ‘The Problem of Privacy in Capitalism and the Alternative Social Networking Site Diaspora’, <em>tripleC: Journal for a Sustainable Information Society </em>10.2 (2012): 600–617.</p> <p class="references">______. ‘Privacy on Social Networking Sites within a Culture of Exchange’, in Wolfgang Stützl, Felix Stalder, Ronald Maier and Theo Hug (eds)<em> Media, Knowledge and Education: Cultures and Ethics of Sharing</em>, Innsbruck: University of Innsbruck Press, 2012, pp. 89-104.</p> <p class="references">Single, Ryan. ‘Interview with Mark Zuckerberg: I Donated to Open Source, Facebook Competitor’, <em>Wired, </em>28 May 2010, <a href="http://www.wired.com/business/2010/05/zuckerberg-interview/">http://www.wired.com/business/2010/05/zuckerberg-interview/</a>. </p> <p class="references">Stallman, Richard M. ‘Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism’, in <em>Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman</em>, Boston: Free Software Foundation, 2010, pp. 129-131.</p> <p class="references">Toffler, Alvin. <em>The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow,</em> New York: Bantam, 1984.</p> <p class="references">Wolf, M. J., K. W. Miller and F. S. Grodzinsky. ‘On the Meaning of Free Software’, <em>Ethics and Information Technology</em> 11.4 (2009): 279–286. </p> <p class="references-last">Wong, Phil. ‘Conversations about the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee’, <em>The Rumpus</em>, 11 January 2010, <a href="http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/3/">http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/3/</a>.</p> <div class="footnotes"> <h6 class="references_title">Notes</h6> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-1" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-1-backlink">1</a>.	Ryan Single ‘Interview with Mark Zuckerberg: I Donated to Open Source, Facebook Competitor’, <em>Wired, </em>28 May 2010, <a href="http://www.wired.com/business/2010/05/zuckerberg-interview/">http://www.wired.com/business/2010/05/zuckerberg-interview/</a>.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-2" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-2-backlink">2</a>.	See, <a href="http://www.alexa.com/topsites">http://www.alexa.com/topsites</a> for a daily update of the world’s top websites. </p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-3" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-3-backlink">3</a>.	Ryan Single ‘Interview with Mark Zuckerberg: I Donated to Open Source, Facebook Competitor’.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-4" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-4-backlink">4</a>.	For more information about the Social Networking Sites in the Surveillance Society project, including detail about the research methodology, see,<strong class="char-style-override-1"> </strong><a href="http://www.sns3.uti.at">www.sns3.uti.at</a>. The research project has been funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and has further developed a critical political economy approach to social media. As part of the research project a qualitative interview study was conducted. We included a group of interviewees who are especially critical of (economic) surveillance and have a high knowledge of privacy issues, as well as a group of less concerned (standard) users. It eventually consisted of 30 Austrian students aged 20 to 34 (two-thirds women and one-third men), who have used or were using SNS, and that we found in the area of Salzburg, Austria. Participants came from a wide range of academic disciplines and study at one of the universities in Salzburg.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-5" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-5-backlink">5</a>.	David A. Ebersman, ‘Facebook, Inc Registration Statement on Form S-1’, Securities and Exchange Commission, 1 February 2012, <a href="http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm">http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm</a>; David A. Ebersman, ‘Facebook, Amendment No. 2 to Form S-1 Registration Statement’, Securities and Exchange Commission, 1 February, 2012, <a href="http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512101422/d287954ds1a.htm#toc287954_2">http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512101422/d287954ds1a.htm#toc287954_2</a>.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-6" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-6-backlink">6</a>.	Amongst others, see for example, Mark Andrejevic, ‘The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploration of Self-Disclosure’, <em>Critical Studies in Media Communication</em> 19.2 (2002); Mark Andrejevic, ‘Social Network Exploitation’, in Zizi Papacharisi (ed.)<em> A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Networking Sites</em>, New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 82–101; Christian Fuchs, ‘Labour in Informational Capitalism’, <em>The Information Society</em> 26.3 (2010): 176–196; Christian Fuchs, ‘The Political Economy of Privacy on Facebook’, <em>Television & New Media </em>13.2 (2012): 139-159.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-7" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-7-backlink">7</a>.	Karl Marx,<em> Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume One,</em> Middlesex: Penguin, 1976 (1867), pp. 270-272; 344; 486; 729-730.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-8" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-8-backlink">8</a>.	Karl Marx,<em> Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, </em>p. 874.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-9" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-9-backlink">9</a>.	Alvin Toffler, <em>The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow,</em> New York: Bantam, 1984; Axel Bruns, <em>Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage</em>. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-10" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-10-backlink">10</a>.	Phil Wong, ‘Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee’, <em>The Rumpus</em>, 11 January 2010, <a href="http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/3/">http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/3/</a>.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-11" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-11-backlink">11</a>.	Edward Comor, ‘Contextualizing and Critiquing the Fantastic Prosumer: Power, Alienation and Hegemony’, <em>Critical Sociology</em> 37.3 (2010): 309–327; Mark Andrejevic, ‘Surveillance and Alienation in the Online Economy’, <em>Surveillance & Society</em> 8.3 (2012): 278–287.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-12" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-12-backlink">12</a>.	Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’, in <em>Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto</em>, Amherst: Prometheus, 1988 (1844), pp. 13–168.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-13" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-13-backlink">13</a>.	Wolfgang Fritz Haug, <em>Vorlesungen Zur Einführung Ins ‘Kapital’</em>, Berlin: Argument, 2005.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-14" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-14-backlink">14</a>.	Eben Moglen, ‘Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing’, speech at a meeting of the Internet Society’s New York Branch, New York, 5 February 2010, transcript published at <a href="http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html">http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html</a>.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-15" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-15-backlink">15</a>.	Eben Moglen, The dotCommunist Manifesto, <a href="http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/dcm.html">http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/dcm.html</a>, 2003.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-16" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-16-backlink">16</a>.	Eben Moglen, ‘Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing’.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-17" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-17-backlink">17</a>.	Eben Moglen, ‘Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing’.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-18" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-18-backlink">18</a>.	See, <a href="https://diasp.eu/stats.html">https://diasp.eu/stats.html</a> for a listing of Diaspora statistics. Last updated 24 November 2011.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-19" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-19-backlink">19</a>.	Christian Fuchs, ‘Information and Communication Technologies and Society: A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy of the Internet’, <em>European Journal of Communication</em> 24.1 (2009): 76-77; Yochai Benkler, <em>The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom,</em> New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, p. 60.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-20" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-20-backlink">20</a>.	Yochai Benkler, <em>The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom</em>; Michel Bauwens, ‘The Political Economy of Peer Production’, <em>Post-autistic Economics Review</em> 37 (2009): 33–44.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-21" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-21-backlink">21</a>.	Karl Marx, <em>A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy</em>. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1909 (1859), p. 12.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-22" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-22-backlink">22</a>.	Richard M. Stallman, ‘Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism’, in <em>Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman</em>, Boston: Free Software Foundation, 2010, pp. 129.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-23" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-23-backlink">23</a>.	Paul B de Laat, ‘Copyright or Copyleft?: An Analysis of Property Regimes for Software Development’, <em>Research Policy</em> 34.10 (2005): 1511–1532; M. J. Wolf, K. W. Miller and F. S. Grodzinsky, ‘On the Meaning of Free Software’, <em>Ethics and Information Technology</em> 11.4 (2009): 279–286.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-24" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-24-backlink">24</a>.	Freedom Box Foundation, flyer about FreedomBox, <a href="http://freedomboxfoundation.org/doc/flyer.pdf">http://freedomboxfoundation.org/doc/flyer.pdf</a>.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-25" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-25-backlink">25</a>.	See list at, <a href="http://podupti.me/">http://podupti.me/</a>.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-26" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-26-backlink">26</a>.	Diaspora, The Diaspora Project, <a href="http://diasporaproject.org/">http://diasporaproject.org/</a>.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-27" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-27-backlink">27</a>.	Diaspora github wiki contributors, ‘Why client side encryption is a bad idea’, April 2012, <a href="https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Why-client-side-encryption-is-a-bad-idea/fafbd3a6d10e021d996dc6c93b7429c9b20c8675">https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Why-client-side-encryption-is-a-bad-idea/fafbd3a6d10e021d996dc6c93b7429c9b20c8675</a>, accessed November 2012. </p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-28" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-28-backlink">28</a>.	‘Diaspora means a brighter future for all of us’, Diaspora, <a href="http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/2011/09/21/diaspora-means-a-brighter-future-for-all-of-us.html">http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/2011/09/21/diaspora-means-a-brighter-future-for-all-of-us.html</a>, 21 September 2011. (emphasis in original).</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-29" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-29-backlink">29</a>.	Christian Fuchs, ‘Labour in Informational Capitalism’: 193.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-30" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-30-backlink">30</a>.	John Edward Campbell and Matt Carlson, ‘Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy’, <em>Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media</em> 46.4 (2002): 588.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-31" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-31-backlink">31</a>.	For a more advanced analysis of the problem of privacy in capitalism as applied to alternative SNS see: Sebastian Sevignani, ‘The Problem of Privacy in Capitalism and the Alternative Social Networking Site Diaspora’, <em>tripleC: Journal for a Sustainable Information Society </em>10.2 (2012): 600–617; Sebastian Sevignani, ‘Privacy on Social Networking Sites within a Culture of Exchange’, in Wolfgang Stützl, Felix Stalder, Ronald Maier and Theo Hug (eds)<em> Media, Knowledge and Education: Cultures and Ethics of Sharing</em>, Innsbruck: University of Innsbruck Press, 2012, pp. 89-104.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-32" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-32-backlink">32</a>.	Nicole B. Ellison, Jessica Vitak, Charles Steinfield, Rebecca Gray and Cliff Lampe, ‘Negotiating Privacy Concerns and Social Capital Needs in a Social Media Environment’, in Sabine Trepte and Leonard Reinecke (eds)<em> Privacy Online: Perspectives on Privacy and Self-disclosure in the Social Web</em>, Berlin: Springer, 2011, pp. 19–32.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-33" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-33-backlink">33</a>.	For example, Jan Fernback and Zizi Papacharisi, ‘Online Privacy as Legal Safeguard: The Relationship Among Consumer, Online Portal, and Privacy Policies’, <em>New Media & Society</em> 9.5 (2007): 715–734; Marisol Sandoval, ‘A Critical Empirical Case Study of Consumer Surveillance on Web 2.0’, in Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval (eds),<em> Internet and Surveillance: The Challenge of Web 2.0 and Social Media</em>, New York: Routledge, 2010.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-311043-34" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-311043-34-backlink">34</a>.	Christian Fuchs, ‘New Media, Web 2.0 and Surveillance’, <em>Sociological Compass</em> 5 (2011): 134–147.</p> </div> </div> </div> </body> </html>