Geo location is another example of geeks being lax on security, like thinking that linux security is ok because its better than windows, or thinking that dinosaur exploits like buffer overflows and such are ok because that is how its always been or its open source. If a big organization didn't bring us SElinux would we have done anything like it in the next 10 years?

We geeks plaster personal information like IRC logs everywhere. We continue to expose the IP address of anyone connected to IRC. Freenode is a monument to geeks not caring about privacy. We make our awstats with IP address listings public because its cool. Our encyption methods are impossible-painful or nothing, never anything in between. We're proud of storeing all our chat publicly for ever on archive.org.

While the "but you have to push a button" defence might work when big corporations are involved...

What about internet bullys? imagine someone sending the goat man to your home address

"Wants to know your location?" "Share Location" sounds like weak UI. very easy to social engineer. or even convince someone knowingly who wouldn't normally enter in any personal information. what is a "location", my computer doesn't have GPS, who would guess? I bet its easier than you or I think it is.

Someone once hacked into a website, i googled his IP, on which i found some Half-life(game) stats pages that publicly lists IP addresses(on purpose) along with his nick name and Half-life-unique-id, from his Half-life-unique-id i could find his Steam-Community-profile which is like Facebook-public-lite, from there i could find all his friends and all sorts of personal information. His tech savy profile matched with the hacking.

(I might be making an assumption with how this is "distributed", friends and trusted servers might be acceptable. But i'm not going to give them the benefit of the doubt because they did a very poor job explaining important details like these.)

Encryption should never be your only line of defence for PRIVATE information.

"Distributed Encrypted Backups" and "distributed" is scary because this is PRIVATE information and not PUBLIC information, not only is this uncharted territory but it is fundamentally wrong. With Tor and Freenet there was nothing of value stored or transferred.

A malicious user could archive torrents of encrypted personal information, even if it takes 20-50 years to crack this is unacceptable. Normally you are just packet sniffing on a small fraction of the population.

This project could be a false prophet that will that will doom the success of any future social projects.

Also, these client diversity and data portability concepts may not be compatible with attempts at real privacy and security, for example your perfect email client and server is at the mercy of the client on the other sending/receiving end. These concepts make the assumption that the indefinite storage of information is a good idea, while i happen to think that the expiration of messages is a good idea, and an idea that can look appealing with the right spin. (well, these concepts are may be ok for making the transition to something better, but i think it encourages defeatism, accepting to be average)

disclaimer, i'm about to finish a security/privacy focused social networking website that isn't exactly 'open' for the foreseeable future but its not feature fancy/flashy either.