I don't think that Professor Moglen's position is that everyone should cease using social networks altogether (from what I understood of our class & readings, he is actually a huge proponent of social networking), but that we should stop tolerating badly designed platforms like facebook and twitter.

It's true, as you mention, that legal regulation & enforcement is one way to avoid privacy invasions on social media. But another way is through technology: introduce a well-designed, decentralized social network that makes it technically impossible (or at least very difficult) for invasion of privacy to occur. With thoughtful design, implementation, and adequate user adoption, such a network could completely mimic the benefits that we currently get from Facebook, without the privacy intrusions.

Of course we are all free to make our own decisions and use whatever services we please for online socializing (guilty facebooker here). But by choosing the inertia of existing centralized services over fledgling distributed models for social networking, we are contributing to the "user adoption" problem for why a technology-based solution to social media's invasion of privacy has not popularly been adopted.

More on Professor Moglen's position on this topic: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/do-not-track/Eben-Moglen-2010-12-2-privacy-testimony.pdf

A list of existing distributed social networks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network

-- CrystalMao - 29 Jan 2012