Social networking, what’s next?

In 2008, I was in Ottawa, talking with one of our clients, CIPPIC. Specifically the executive director at the time, about Facebook. There was discussion that Facebook was perhaps not complying with PIPEDA (Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act).
After much research, CIPPIC submitted their findings to the federal privacy commissioner of Canada. One year later, the privacy commissioner’s office responded.
As a result, some interesting precedence was set by Facebook followed the privacy commissioner’s recommendations!
Fast forward another year, we have the CEO of Facebook stating “the age of privacy is over” and more recently chat logs released of saying people are dumb for providing him their information, all along the same time while Facebook provides more and more of it’s user’s personal information to the entire internet.
Well, we’re now ready for the next thing. There are many people threatening to boycott Facebook by ditching their account, but I would suggest the opportunity to stay socially connected is addictive, and until the next solution is ready, we’ll reluctantly hang out on Facebook for now.
There are other organizations out there right now who have raised 6 figures to build a privacy forward social networking website, but will they be successful? There are millions waiting with bated breath.

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