[p2p-research] faroo p2p search + facebook quitters

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi sepp, I wonder if you could look into this:

(I would also appreciate your comments on danah boyd's critique of facebook
quitters ... see
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/23/quitting-facebook-is-pointless-challenging-them-to-do-better-is-not.html)

Michel


 Bernard Lunn <http://bernardlunn.wordpress.com/about/>
May 27th, 2010 at 9:18 am
<http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/23/quitting-facebook-is-pointless-challenging-them-to-do-better-is-not.html/comment-page-2#comment-81451>

Disclosure: I represent FAROO and we are using p2p to solve both privacy &
search scalability

This is the big conflict: we need community powered personalization to
filter information but we also need privacy. It is possible that p2p, where
no data is stored/controlled centrally and is encrypted on the wire, is the
only way to do this.

FAROO has been working on this for many years and have now proved that it is
possible: our p2p search network has 1.7 million peers with search latency
below 1 second.

You mentioned two questions around p2p. These are things we have been
thinking about for a long time.

“I am all in favor of people building what they believe to be alternatives
to Facebook. I even invested in Diaspora because I’m curious what will come
of that system. But I don’t believe that Diaspora is a Facebook killer. I do
believe that there is a potential for Diaspora to do something interesting
that will play a different role in the ecosystem and I look forward to
seeing what they develop. I’m also curious about the future of peer-to-peer
systems in light of the move towards the cloud, but I’m not convinced that
decentralization is a panacea to all of our contemporary woes.
Realistically, I don’t think that most users around the globe will find a
peer-to-peer solution worth the hassle. The cost/benefit analysis isn’t in
their favor. ”

The download hurdle is a common reservation. It has not proved a hurdle when
the payoff is big enough – think Skype and Spotify. And more recently the
iPhone and Android app stores have totally changed the mindset around
downloading software. The key issue I think is what you mention – “hassle”.
It is a hassle free experience on iPhone but people have found the
experience less than hassle-free on the PC. That is why Diaspora may find
the technical challenges harder than they think. Making p2p totally
scalable, reliable and hassle free is not simple.

“I’m also patently afraid that a system like Diaspora will be quickly
leveraged for child pornography and other more problematic uses that tend to
emerge when there isn’t a centralized control system.”

In Diaspora each user places their profile on their own server, so they will
held responsible anyway. If people would like to store illegal things on a
server they can do it all the time, they don’t need Diaspora for this. FAROO
only indexes information that is already publicly available. If something is
bad, you can remove the original page, than it will disappear from the p2p
system, automatically.

Recently Google offered https encrypted search for more privacy:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/search-more-securely-with-encrypted.html

While Google’s https search eliminates wiretapping by intermediate parties,
but they still collect log files.

HTTPS does not protect against a leak of those log files by technical
problems, human error, later changes of terms of services, criminal data
theft, legal challenges, or silent cooperation with interested authorities.

Google still collects personal data, but offers privacy by policy (which can
be changed or challenged). The same is true of Facebook clearly!

FAROO in turn does not collect personal data at all, and offers privacy by
architectural design (attention data for ranking are anonymized /search
queries stay encrypted all the time, because the index is encrypted itself /
there is no central data repository which could be wiretapped).

 Bernard Lunn <http://bernardlunn.wordpress.com/about/>
May 27th, 2010 at 9:18 am
<http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/23/quitting-facebook-is-pointless-challenging-them-to-do-better-is-not.html/comment-page-2#comment-81451>

Disclosure: I represent FAROO and we are using p2p to solve both privacy &
search scalability

This is the big conflict: we need community powered personalization to
filter information but we also need privacy. It is possible that p2p, where
no data is stored/controlled centrally and is encrypted on the wire, is the
only way to do this.

FAROO has been working on this for many years and have now proved that it is
possible: our p2p search network has 1.7 million peers with search latency
below 1 second.

You mentioned two questions around p2p. These are things we have been
thinking about for a long time.

“I am all in favor of people building what they believe to be alternatives
to Facebook. I even invested in Diaspora because I’m curious what will come
of that system. But I don’t believe that Diaspora is a Facebook killer. I do
believe that there is a potential for Diaspora to do something interesting
that will play a different role in the ecosystem and I look forward to
seeing what they develop. I’m also curious about the future of peer-to-peer
systems in light of the move towards the cloud, but I’m not convinced that
decentralization is a panacea to all of our contemporary woes.
Realistically, I don’t think that most users around the globe will find a
peer-to-peer solution worth the hassle. The cost/benefit analysis isn’t in
their favor. ”

The download hurdle is a common reservation. It has not proved a hurdle when
the payoff is big enough – think Skype and Spotify. And more recently the
iPhone and Android app stores have totally changed the mindset around
downloading software. The key issue I think is what you mention – “hassle”.
It is a hassle free experience on iPhone but people have found the
experience less than hassle-free on the PC. That is why Diaspora may find
the technical challenges harder than they think. Making p2p totally
scalable, reliable and hassle free is not simple.

“I’m also patently afraid that a system like Diaspora will be quickly
leveraged for child pornography and other more problematic uses that tend to
emerge when there isn’t a centralized control system.”

In Diaspora each user places their profile on their own server, so they will
held responsible anyway. If people would like to store illegal things on a
server they can do it all the time, they don’t need Diaspora for this. FAROO
only indexes information that is already publicly available. If something is
bad, you can remove the original page, than it will disappear from the p2p
system, automatically.

Recently Google offered https encrypted search for more privacy:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/search-more-securely-with-encrypted.html

While Google’s https search eliminates wiretapping by intermediate parties,
but they still collect log files.

HTTPS does not protect against a leak of those log files by technical
problems, human error, later changes of terms of services, criminal data
theft, legal challenges, or silent cooperation with interested authorities.

Google still collects personal data, but offers privacy by policy (which can
be changed or challenged). The same is true of Facebook clearly!

FAROO in turn does not collect personal data at all, and offers privacy by
architectural design (attention data for ranking are anonymized /search
queries stay encrypted all the time, because the index is encrypted itself /
there is no central data repository which could be wiretapped).


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