I don't buy it...but having just recently deleted all forms of private social media, I'll comment only on the technical challenges in securing information.

Indeed, if your current social network has no obligation to respect the obscurity of your information, what justifies believing other companies will continue to be trustworthy over time?

The easy answer is nothing. So cut out the middle man. I wouldn't communicate my personal life through a human I don't know, so why the hell would it make sense to send it, in an easily readable form, through a company that stands to benefit from selling my information?

Now, one might be tempted to build a technical solution to this problem. I wouldn't mind a service built around end-to-end secure communication, open source, and easily distributable to multiple servers. One where I could generate a public and private key, and share photos and messages with friends knowing that only those marked as recipients could ever read them.

This already exists in the form of PGP + email, but there is room for tools on top. Perhaps move the storage and transfer elsewhere, since most emails cap the size of individual messages as well as long term archives and generally frowned upon for blanket-sharing. Then just add pretty interfaces and wide-platform support. Let me group my friends' public keys as Google+ manages circles.

If information can be leaked, at least let it require a violation of trust from someone I know personally.

So don't use a credit card. Don't have cable. Don't use the Internet. Don't use the phone. Don't have a bank account. Don't go to the hospital. Don't have a job. Don't rent an apartment. Don't subscribe to any magazine or newspapers. Don't do anything that creates a record. In other words, go live like a hermit in a mountain or cabin.

I wouldn't do any of those things if I could stay functional without them. But the benefits of using a credit card outweigh the costs of being another row in a database collecting statistics on my life. And the difference is that I am perfectly happy living in a world sans Facebook.

In fact, I'd say I'm happier now that I focus solely on my own life without any services reminding me about how others life their's. But that's getting into the psychological side of social networks, which I'll refrain from discussing any further, in this comment at least.