Ilya Zhitomirskiy | Social site founder, 22

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 22, a cofounder of the start-up social network Diaspora*, which has been described as the "anti-Facebook" for its emphasis on personal privacy and decentralized data collection, died Saturday at his home in San Francisco.

The San Francisco police, in confirming his death, did not give the cause. Friends and associates of Mr. Zhitomirskiy said there were indications of suicide.

Mr. Zhitomirskiy was a student at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 2010 when he and three fellow undergraduates conceived the idea for a Web-based community that would give users, rather than the website itself, control of the information they shared.

Instead of creating a central database like Facebook's, where information about hundreds of millions of members is stored and mined for advertising and marketing purposes, their idea was to develop freely shared software that would allow every member of the network to "own" his or her personal information.

Mr. Zhitomirskiy, an impish self-styled radical, unicyclist and competitive ballroom dancer, was a member of the liberation technology movement, which views the conglomeration of personal information by large corporate and government bodies as a threat to civil liberties and human rights.

Ilya Alekseevich Zhitomirskiy was born Oct. 12, 1989, in Moscow to Alexei and Inna Zhitomirskiy. His father and his grandfather Garri Zhitomirskiy are mathematicians. After the family moved to the United States in 2000, Mr. Zhitomirskiy attended public schools in Massachusetts, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, where his father found work teaching and later in business.

In a September 2010 interview in New York magazine, Mr. Zhitomirskiy said the open platform model for Diaspora* would not make him and his partners rich.

"There's something deeper than making money off stuff," he said. "Being part of creating stuff for the universe is awesome." - N.Y. Times News Service