[agmcleod]

It's worse than facebook because there's no one to have responsibility to be accountable. This ties in with your question about GDPR. While I'm not a lawyer, as far as I know it doesn't matter if you're a person or a company, if you're collecting data, it's something you can be liable for. So in a distributed system, all parties who maintain the data sources would be liable. I actually wonder how this works logistically in terms of storing account info on something like Ethereum.

[notheguyouthink]

> It's worse than facebook because there's no one to have responsibility to be accountable.

I guess I just don't understand what accountability there is to be even had? If I send an encrypted message to my friend, who is accountable? What are they accountable for?

If I'm sending illegal content to someone only I can be held accountable (and possibly the person I'm sending to). Is that any different in Scuttlebutts case?

[agmcleod]

Ah i think i may have misunderstood how the system is made. It is purely peer to peer. So any issues could be if the software has a security vulnerability, but I'm not sure how that ties in with things like "as-use" open source licensing. This post explained the network fairly well I found: https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html

As far as GDPR goes, you're right because you're specifically choosing people to send it to. However, having a mechanism to delete your messages on other people's systems when they sync would probably go a long way.

[madamelic]

>It's worse than facebook because there's no one to have responsibility to be accountable.

Yeah, it is worse because if you screw up, you don't have anyone to blame but yourself.

You have complete control over your data.

[trimtab]

It is no worse than email is now. In fact, it's better because only allowed clients can read messages authorized for them.

[deadbunny]

True for 1to1 messages, everything else is stored in plaintext and public.