181–190 of 199 posts
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Hn and reddit are the same format. And linkedin could easily merge with facebook. But facebook and twitter don’t mix > How many people are in multiple Slack groups Aren’t they using a single app?
> Hn and reddit are the same format. No they are not. there are no sub-HNs.
The problem with the latter is it doesn't really do a lot for the vast majority of users wishing to use a competitor. Sure, they can take their data there but who is going to be able to see it easily?
I wish it all worked like email. I can use any email provider I want, and people can send me mail, regardless of which provider they use. It isn't perfect (for instance gmail does some stuff with images and links to youtube videos and links to maps and so on that others don't, so I find myself using the product a bit differently if I know the recipient is using gmail), but still it is better than facebook etc where if you share via a product, the people seeing what you share have to use that product too. So basically what that means is competing (or complementary) products should be able to post your stuff to facebook as if you had posted it yourself.
Or something. I don't know the exact solution, but I certainly support legislation forcing such companies to open up their platforms. Network monopolies are not good for consumers and not good for innovative competitors.
Who asked for this, exactly? I know plenty of users who would like to delete their data--I can't think of too many that want to port it over somewhere else. Is the idea that this would fuel competition by allowing people to migrate their history over to decentralized/federated alternatives?
That's a good question. And how would it work.
A couple cases I can see - photos and email. Export my email from gmail, import it to protonmail, delete gmail account. OK. How about incoming email though? That's not content I created or own the copyright to. What about emails I sent to people that are copy pastes of news article material or attached photos determined to be copyrighted by someone else. Perhaps these should be filtered out so it's only the user's personally created content that is downloaded. Now photos from one service to another have that same check that should be done. But the matter of comments on the photo. Some comments are responses from the photo owner. Others are comments by random people. Those comments should not be exported since they don't have the rights to transfer them. So I upload this to some other photo site and have a bunch of one sided conversations. Fair enough though I can see how that works.
Then I want to export all my conversations from Hacker News and import them to Reddit. Hacker News will give me a zipped set of xml files or perhaps a SQLite database. Then I create some custom subreddit and upload these comments there. But they'll all be one-sided conversations of course since the people I'm replying to or who reply to me can't be part of the data dump. So I've done this, but why is it necessary this be supported at all? How about reverse? I tell Hacker News, hey the law says you have to let me import my comments from reddit here. So I do that. And what is that supposed to accomplish. Not sure. Maybe people will then say hey I want to upload my photos from Instagram to the Steam Store's comments section. Or upload all my email there.
Also of interest is that every site will have to support every conceivable possible export format generated by every other site. Complex job for those of us who have struggled with similar data migration problems with a finite set of formats and possible errors in the data. And what about the data that has errors? Will the exporting company by liable for costs by the importing company due to errors in the exporting company's export job?
Also the article suggests the bill is a bit more extreme than this. The user will not actually download the data and reupload it somewhere, instead they will go to Facebook and pick "Hacker News" from a drop down menu and then Facebook will be required to send all the user's data to Hacker News automatically and Hacker News will be required to accept it and do something with it, presumably provide similar functionality that the user is accustomed to. Perhaps Hacker News will then be legally required to implement a clone of Facebook, gmail, Instagram, and every other social media site simply to be able to handle these import requests. And every other site likewise will be required to do the same.
What about illegal content and content that violates the importing services TOS? Will they be forced to accept the data and yet responsible still for hosting it even if they don't want it? Someone wants to export their homemade videos from their YouPorn account to YouTube or maybe to the comment section of the New York Times which should now support and host video. Can they refuse to interoperate under this bill mandating interoperating?
Everything should be interoperable and all formats exportable from every site and importable to every other site, automatically. Is this a sensible goal.
I have a suspicion that the senators supporting this bill really just want to be able to export their email from gmail and yahoo for free and import it to some other email service so they want to pass a law. And then they were brainstorming and someone said hey let's make this law apply to all forms of data, not just email. And they all thought that a great idea. Then the masses hear about this and think "Wow this is great, I'd love to get all my data from every site and upload it to every other site." without actually realizing that a law mandating companies support that is probably not a good idea.
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> we should advocate that users have the right to delegate data-access through APIs to third-parties From my PoV, for my purposes, as a technically minded user I might agree. But thinking about the numpty-on-the-street, this could be a privacy nightmare with people being easily conned into allowing a random application full unrestricted access to slurp their data. This can happen already, of course, but the provider…
Can’t you already post through the Facebook API, just in a non-standardized format? I know you can’t anymore for Instagram, but I thought that third parties could post to your feed with your authorization.
(It used to be possible, but they removed that API after Cambridge Analytica.)
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?
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Facebook's argument that this data actually belongs to the friends and not the profile that's being exported, while convenient for Facebook, has to be acknowledged as a reasonable point of view on this matter.
Their argument doesn't hold up under the slightest amount of scrutiny. You can go to your friends' pages and manually extract their email or other contact information. If it's visible to you, its because your friend made a decision to make that information visible. They designed the data export tool that way knowing that the main thing someone trying to leave Facebook wants is contact information for their friends th…
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With such a shallow view of freedom, physical property ownership is a very anti-freedom concept as well, is it not? Ownership of a house is an infringement on the freedoms of other poeple who want to live there? Intellectual property is no different than any other sort of property. The right to own property is invaluable, and serves the purpose of maximizing freedoms in the long run.
Ill-gotten goods can be confiscated. The same for knowledge would involve lobotomies. Would you please hold still for a moment?
There's an increasing amount of bureaucracy in the tech space that it is going to make it very hard to innovate. Laws typically deeper entrench bigger companies because they have the resources to have full legal teams and departments dedicated to compliance. Startups do not.
G Suite, or what was originally "Google Apps for Your Domain" is a white-labeled Gmail. Commercial social media companies can theoretically make some serious money by whitelabeling their services and selling those to whoever has an audience. Stop thinking about things in terms of followers - it's the publishers that need to be captured for revenue. What I'd really like to see from U.S. Senators is legislation to requ…
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Hn and reddit are the same format. And linkedin could easily merge with facebook. But facebook and twitter don’t mix > How many people are in multiple Slack groups Aren’t they using a single app?
And you expect legislators to understand that distinction?