U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#101

Post by kickscondor » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 3:29 PM UTC

ysavir wrote: post #71

kickscondor wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You certainly can export a single node - just depends on your expectations. For example, the Indieweb has already done this in a way that I find acceptable. My blog (kickscondor.com) syndicates all the comments to every post (including deeply nested ones.) And it also captures a copy of all posts that I respond to (all the way up the chain going backwards.) This is sufficient for me. No need to export anything - it's…

> My blog (kickscondor.com) syndicates all the comments to every post What does this mean?

When someone wants to comment, they post - not on my blog - but on their blog. If their blog supports Webmentions, my blog will get notified and I will 'syndicate' their comment - a copy will get placed on my blog. This way everyone in the conversation had copies of the entire conversation in case one blog goes down. (Does that clear it up at all?)

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#102

Post by MR4D » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 3:29 PM UTC

This bill is great in theory, but....

Getting the language correct and the implementation will be extraordinarily difficult. For instance:

Let's say you are on twitter. Does twitter have to build an email interface so I can DM my friends who are on gmail?

Or maybe I'm on Facebook - do they have to let me allow people on Myspace to "friend" me?

Maybe I see an article on ZDnet, and I'm tired of using multiple accounts, so instead, I'd like to move away from Discus to Matrix for posting. Who is responsible here - ZDnet, Discus, Matrix?

Will MSFT be forced to allow me to port my entire Skype history and number to Verizon? Or to WeChat?

Will AT&T and instagram be forced to allow me to post on instagram using my AT&T account?

Interoperability of protocols is important (e.g. one email provider not blocking another). But the law of unintended consequences here is going to be huge. Security alone is going to be a nightmare.

I agree this goal is laudable, but the government never made Fords have to use GM parts (only that they use standardized gasoline). I think the idea that they have to expose an interface makes sense, and is much less problematic than full portability and interoperability.

Words are important here, and the actual word choices in the legislation are going to radically affect our future.

Read that last sentence again - this is a huge problem with any major legislation, and legislation with technology in particular.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#103

Post by danShumway » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #91

danShumway wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's API is notoriously bad for 3rd party apps.[0] In order to use the standard API, you need to register for a developer account, which requires manual approval and which Twitter can deny for any reason.[1] Facebook has a history of outright suing 3rd party apps.[2] If I can log into Twitter, I should also be able to update my account with an HTTP request. That's it. I shouldn't need to sign an agreement, or te…

i wonder what caused them to limit their platforms so much.

A mixture of bad tech legislation, concerns over Russian interference, and good old-fashioned anti-competitive tendencies.

Having itself supplanted MySpace, Facebook is in a good position to see how easy data-exports can help competitors supplant a dominant company.

3rd-party clients are also a good way to remove ads and tracking, which is obviously not in Twitter or Facebook's best financial interest.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#104

Post by purple_ducks » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #89

danShumway wrote: post #55

> The bill would require communications platforms with more than 100 million monthly active members - Facebook has more than two billion - to allow its users to easily move, or port, their data to another network, Warner’s office said in a statement. Facebook already has a data export feature. You have to manually navigate to that page and download a giant zip file. Cool. The much more important concept being propose…

> Facebook already has a data export feature. No it doesn't. It doesn't have the phone numbers or email addresses for the vast majority of people, even the ones who have their email address and phone number in their profile.

That's not your data - it's theirs (the respective persons)

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#105

Post by wmf » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #89

danShumway wrote: post #55

> The bill would require communications platforms with more than 100 million monthly active members - Facebook has more than two billion - to allow its users to easily move, or port, their data to another network, Warner’s office said in a statement. Facebook already has a data export feature. You have to manually navigate to that page and download a giant zip file. Cool. The much more important concept being propose…

> Facebook already has a data export feature. No it doesn't. It doesn't have the phone numbers or email addresses for the vast majority of people, even the ones who have their email address and phone number in their profile.

Facebook lets you export "your data" which they define as data that you input into Facebook. They don't define it as data that you can see. Likewise companies usually don't let you export what their machine learning AIs have inferred about you. So they're using loopholes to make data portability less useful.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#106

Post by buboard » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

egypturnash wrote: post #98

buboard wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wonder what caused them to limit their platforms so much.

wanting to own all ads placed against user content wanting to lock users in and make it harder to leave for another service and still maintain a presence (which is also a constant ad for that other service) by cross-posting wanting to make it harder to see the stuff you're following people for without ads inserted every few posts

It s still possible to leave but nobody leaves. Surely they benefit from some extra safeguards, but i don't think either are worried that users will take their data elsewhere. Usually when a new platform emerges, it 's a new format (e.g. tiktok).

I 'm pretty sure their response was in order to avoid bad PR during the Analytica scandal period.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#107

Post by zubspace » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

Iv wrote: post #61

zubspace wrote: post #28

> The bill would require communications platforms with more than 100 million monthly active members - Facebook has more than two billion - to allow its users to easily move, or port, their data to another network, Warner’s office said in a statement. I assume that this proposal is based on good intentions. But how they want to overcome the technical hurdles is a mystery to me. Who decides, how facebook should structu…

All data should be exportable in a single file in a documented format with no encryption, no patents, no copyright or trademark claims attached to it. I think this would solve all problems. An open standard would quickly appear and every platform would support it.

Exporting data is alot simpler than importing data. I therefore doubt that all platform providers will sit together and debate, how to structure your content. In some way this could even be impossible. Let's say platform A uses id's for references, platform B uses hashes. platform C uses GUIDs. This doesn't stop here. Think about image codecs or internal links. This makes writing importers a huge pain.

Only large companies will be able to maintain different kinds of data, which will push new user to them, because they provide most integrations.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#108

Post by megous » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

silon42 wrote: post #73

danShumway wrote: post #55

> The bill would require communications platforms with more than 100 million monthly active members - Facebook has more than two billion - to allow its users to easily move, or port, their data to another network, Warner’s office said in a statement. Facebook already has a data export feature. You have to manually navigate to that page and download a giant zip file. Cool. The much more important concept being propose…

> should advocate that users have the right to delegate data-access through APIs to third-parties Not just third parties, but themselves (aka, write/use your own client for messenger/discord/...). This is the only way to get rid of having to use dozens of clients for various networks (apart from total standardization and federation which isn't happening anytime soon)

Yeah, EU made the same mistake with banking APIs. Banks now have to have API access, but not for end users, just for registered intermediaries. It just pushes the data into hands of more corporations, instead of giving users easy access to their bank.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#109

Post by justapassenger » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

basch wrote: post #9

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #4

Being able to take your data with you is good but most of the value in social media is due to the network effect. If you can't seamlessly being your connections with you, the incumbents will continue to have a huge advantage over newcomers to the market. In the context of social media, how could someone bring their connections with them to a new platform without compromising the rights of those connected to?

interoperability and distributed federation would be much more powerful than export. Maybe they dont know facebook already has an export button? And if that export is in a non-standard-structured format, its not even useful to import into another network.

> interoperability and distributed federation would be much more powerful than export

It'd be great. But at the same time, interoperability brought us Cambridge Analytica scandal. I don't know who social networks could be interoperable without data leaks.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#110

Post by MR4D » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

MR4D wrote: post #102

This bill is great in theory, but.... Getting the language correct and the implementation will be extraordinarily difficult. For instance: Let's say you are on twitter. Does twitter have to build an email interface so I can DM my friends who are on gmail? Or maybe I'm on Facebook - do they have to let me allow people on Myspace to "friend" me? Maybe I see an article on ZDnet, and I'm tired of using multiple accounts,…

One thing I forgot to add - how would this interoperate with the GDPR laws?

For instance, if I move my data from FB to something else, what happens to the email addresses and phone number of all the people I'm connected with? Assume this gets even worse when you have social platforms based in different countries (e.g. EU, US, Russia, China for instance).