What's intriguing about all this is that it, as McGregor puts it, violates many assumptions we have about the way the web works. When we post to a site, we are used to that site controlling whatever it is that we've sent to them. That seemed like the tradeoff you had to make in exchange for a service like Facebook. But McGregor and his team argue that it's simply not necessary to give away that level of control. And they are building the technology to prove it.

The fact that the content is user-controlled, however, has some fascinating repercussions. Email that sits in the cloud -- like Gmail -- could be edited by the sender even after its been received. Tweets could change on a tweeter's whim. The semi-permanence and dependability of the social web could break down. Giving users power doesn't only affect the corporate services they use, but other users of those networks as well.

Still, Privly is a radical departure from the hat-in-hand begging that users have previously had to do to gain control over the information they share. If something like Privly were to catch on, it could have several important impacts. Especially once the peer-to-peer service were established, Privly could be a useful tool for activists who want to use social networking tools but don't want their opponents to be able to see their posts. That its to say, it could provide a new avenue for free speech on the Internet. As noted earlier, we assume cloud-based email and applications to be durable records of communication. That would not longer be the case. And of course, this model runs directly against the standard social network business model of running ads against the specific type of content you've posted.

On Privly's Kickstarter, several prospective backers have made comments questioning pieces of the proposal. Namely, do we want a social web that's so easily editable? That's a tough question, but McGregor wants us to think about something else: do we want a social web in which users actually own nothing?

For what it's worth, we aren't trying to change the internet, but we do want a new deal where participation doesn't require giving companies the right to sell your data. We wish this wasn't necessary, but we've seen too many examples of sites violating their users privacy, and of everyone from stalkers to employers to governments tracking and misusing information. You should have the right to protect your content. You should have the right to delete your content. We'll deliver the tools that allow you to do so, and hope the need doesn't grow further.



I think Privly is best viewed as an argument in code. It's an attempt to expand the philosophical and technical terrain on which the privacy debate is playing out. Privly is saying, "The deal between users and services just doesn't have to be the way that it is." I may not agree with the specific implementation of the tool, but its existence changes the ways we can think about privacy.

