The new technology that aspires to #deletefacebook

It’s been a terrible week for Facebook, with policy-makers and users alike demanding answers from the social network over its Cambridge Analytica fiasco, in which the data analysis firm improperly accessed the personal information of about 50 million Facebook users.

But the backlash has had at least one major beneficiary. That’s Mastodon, a Twitter-like social network that’s had a massive spike in sign-ups this week. As the #deletefacebook movement has gained steam, people are registering for Mastodon at four times the rate that they normally do, according to Eugen Rochko, the service’s creator.

Between Monday and Tuesday alone, Mastodon gained about 5,800 new users, Rochko said in an interview. That’s more new registrations than what Mastodon typically sees over an entire week.

For a relatively new social network — Mastodon has 1.1 million users to Facebook’s 2.2 billion — that may not sound very impressive. But what makes Mastodon increasingly attractive, particularly in a post-#deletefacebook world, is its attitude toward data and control — two of the same issues that now bedevil Facebook as it seeks to justify its data-hungry business model to outraged users.

Mastodon’s code is opensource, meaning anybody can inspect its design. It’s distributed, meaning that it doesn’t run in some data centre controlled by corporate executives, but instead is run by its own users who set up independent servers. And its development costs are paid for by online donations, rather than through the marketing of users’ personal information.

Designers like Rochko are part of a wave of technological innovators who aimed to claw back some of the power that elites, such as Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, have spent the past decade amassing. Rooted in the idea that it doesn’t benefit consumers to depend on centralized commercial platforms sucking up users’ personal information, these entrepreneurs believe they can restore a bit of the magic from the Internet’s earlier days — back when everything was open and interoperable, not siloed and commercialized.

Facebook’s most important innovation, at least from a business perspective, was its aggressive collection and use of customer data for advertising purposes. Facebook not only gathers the information that we volunteer

about ourselves, such as email addresses and birthdays, but also data that we generate simply by using the platform, such as likes, friend connections and more. This information, as we learned from Cambridge Analytica’s whistleblower, can be extremely powerful in the wrong hands.

Facebook pledged this week to crack down on apps on its platform that may be leaking user data to third parties. But, in the end, that promise simply highlights how much of a say Facebook has over our digital fate — in some cases, it may be allowing our information to spread to who-knows-where, without our explicit knowledge.

How to keep an eye on our data as it moves from one owner to another is a tricky problem that Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali have been working on since 2013. When the pair founded Blockstack, a new kind of app marketplace, they flipped the model on its head. What if instead of trusting companies to hold all your data, the information always stayed with you, on your computer or a cloud storage provider of your choice? And what if every time a new app wanted to access your data you simply gave it a key that could decrypt all that personal information that you controlled? If you later decided the app was no good, you could just take back the key.