An interesting point, and I generally agree. But RE &quot;avoidable monopolies&quot;:<p>&gt; <i>Why is there a copy of your photos on Facebook&#x27;s servers? If one of your friends wants to see one of your photos, why are they not getting it directly from you? Then you don&#x27;t have to trust Facebook with a copy of it. So the solution for this half of the problem is, disintermediate the avoidable monopolies.</i><p>It&#x27;s because decentralization like that is stupidly, <i>stupidly</i> inefficient. Not to mention that the assumption that your phone is actually on-line 24&#x2F;7 is unrealistic, and that&#x27;s before we notice we&#x27;re not on IPv6 yet, or that people also use cameras, or that they change their phones, go out of service range or simply want to free up space on SD card for something else.<p>So the fundamental reasons are a) efficiency, and b) availability. That&#x27;s not to say things couldn&#x27;t be improved wrt. privacy. I don&#x27;t know that much about crypto yet (that&#x27;s about to change, for work-related reasons), but I vaguely recall that there are encryption schemes that would let only you and your friends access the data stored on third party servers, and that would make the data unreadable for said third party.