cebook has been battling users, prominent people in the high-tech field, and privacy advocates over the question of privacy for years now, and the problem appears to have intensified.

In November 2008, Evan Prodromou -- founder of identi.ca and CEO and lead developer of StatusNet -- published a blog post on autonomo.us in which he argued that we need a distributed model for social networking sites.

Some of the most popular sites such as Facebook, Prodromou said, are "some of the most egregious walled gardens on the Internet," despite the fact that there are a lot of free and open source applications for building social networks out there, and most of them work in a distributed model.

"The Philosopher's Stone for social networking on the Web will be a standard for distributed sociality, defining 'friend' relationships between people and groups with identities on different servers," he wrote. "We need to make the social Web look more like the document Web -- open, distributed and interconnected."

Prodromou will be first to present his arguments in a LinuxInsider debate series exploring the potential of open source to answer the privacy questions surrounding major social networks.