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Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

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Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#161

Post by erikpukinskis »

pjmorris wrote: post #143
rohan1024 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We humans have a tendency where: we invent something, exploit it only to realise at later point the mess that has happened and then correct our path. I see lot of negative comments on this thread but solid/polypoly is the beginning of that path correction for web. They might not succeed but something with the same underlying idea is going to.

Dave Winer is fond of quoting John Gilmore, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." It feels to me like the current breach of privacy in exchange for 'free' services might now begin to be interpreted as damage.

I think in the eyes of “The Net”, as anthropomorphized by Winer, privacy might look like a form of censorship.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#162

Post by erikpukinskis »

morelisp wrote: post #156
kapnobatairza wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on JCDecaux smart signage. The camera is used for analytics purposes using computer vision (people counting, attentiveness, demographic data, dwell times, etc.). Nothing is recorded. In some cases, processing even happens at the edge.

> Nothing is recorded. In some cases, processing even happens at the edge. If the data is not processed at the edge, how is nothing recorded? This smells like extremely minced words. IANAL (definitely not a German one) but I'm almost certain that even post-2017 it's still illegal to take video in a public space and send it elsewhere, without a sign, even if that video is not in some sense "preserved" elsewhere.

If data stays in RAM and is not written to permanent storage, I think you can reasonably say it’s not recorded.

Frankly, I think you could even persist it to disk as long as it was pruned within 24 hours and reasonably say it’s not recorded.

Otherwise I’m not sure how you can argue ANY data is “unrecorded”. Writing to a hardware buffer in the camera module would seem like “recording” to me by the strict standard.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#163

Post by erikpukinskis »

bluesign wrote: post #37

This kills the innovation or puts too much power to the first innovator. - if solid will dictate a protocol for data, it should cover the common denominator: so if you have your email on gmail now, lets say solid is covering basic email structure, i can move my email data to another provider, but about my filters? On other tiny stuff that gmail builds on email - if i invent something new in a chat app, lets say stick…

The first innovator has already come and went along with dozens of others. It’s not a new idea.

If Solid wins the market, they will have earned their position by overcoming incredible odds and offering something millions of people want.

This thread is full of people arguing how unlikely that is, so if it comes to pass, it will say something much more about Solid than “they were first”.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#164

Post by erikpukinskis »

mkl wrote: post #90
theK wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for one your data lives in a place where you can govern it. Nowadays your data lives in all places you use (Facebook, Gmail, Twitter). Ever tried taking stock of your data lately? It can take weeks to do it for all services and importing the exports into a self hosted alternative is nigh impossible. Still one risk I am seeing is that services might still want to intern you once you have given than access to your…

As soon as you grant access to some data in your pod to someone, they can make a copy and then it's out of your control. I don't see how you can govern it unless you just never grant access.

You still control the original and they control the copy.

If it’s hosted on their service you don’t control anything.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#165

Post by gonehome »

One benefit to this model is it fixes the way we currently handle things like contacts.

Right now if you have my phone number on your phone and my number changes you have stale data. If I don't want you to have my number anymore there isn't a great way to do much about that.

If you're allowing/removing access to a pod you host then when you update your phone number all of the people with access will get that updated information. You can also more easily remove access from people.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#166

Post by atoav »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #162
morelisp wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing is recorded. In some cases, processing even happens at the edge. If the data is not processed at the edge, how is nothing recorded? This smells like extremely minced words. IANAL (definitely not a German one) but I'm almost certain that even post-2017 it's still illegal to take video in a public space and send it elsewhere, without a sign, even if that video is not in some sense "preserved" elsewhere.

If data stays in RAM and is not written to permanent storage, I think you can reasonably say it’s not recorded. Frankly, I think you could even persist it to disk as long as it was pruned within 24 hours and reasonably say it’s not recorded. Otherwise I’m not sure how you can argue ANY data is “unrecorded”. Writing to a hardware buffer in the camera module would seem like “recording” to me by the strict standard.

If I go and record a stranger in the street today in Germany I am quite certain that would be illegal even if I delete the recording within 24h.

And I studied Film in Germany and had to deal with precisely this a hundred times. If WallDecaux is doing this, it is at least a legal grey area, unless they operate on private property, look at their own private property and have a sign that says there is a camera in operation.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#167

Post by andrewrothman »

I have mixed feelings about Solid. I really love the ideas behind it, and having Tim Berners-Lee (big name in tech) at the helm is a huge plus. However, I have some trouble with some of the technical choices, like RDF/Turtle. Given that most web developers are familiar with JSON, and many web APIs / services talk JSON exclusively, I feel like that should be the default recommended choice. Given that there is a lot of semantic web data already in RDF, I think that format should be supported, but not encouraged going forward.

I also think it's clear that Google and Facebook are not going to want to give up control of this data, and are highly incentivized to provide the best and cheapest services they can to keep users on their platforms. People are used to keeping their stuff in Google Drive, and wouldn't move it unless there was an easy way to do so and a good reason to even think about doing that.

I'm excited to see where it goes though, as centralization is a big problem on the web today. I try to self-host my own personal data but it's so hard to work with it in nice consumer apps. For example, I'd love to see CalDAV and CardDAV supported in Android, but for now I need to use DAVx⁵ to sync my info, and it doesn't seem to show up in Outlook for Android after years of requests to Microsoft for the feature.

I'd really like to hear other thoughts on this, as I'd love to see Solid succeed. Anyone working on Solid in this thread?

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#168

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #119
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is forcing anyone to pay for anything. If a paid product gains enough momentum to crush free products, then it is the free market in action yet again. Short of rough men threatening to do violence upon you, nobody is being "forced" to pay for anything.

I think your point is largely valid today, but there is push for a regulatory regime to force some of those privacy invading, but "free" options to either be greatly curtailed or eliminated. Without getting into whether such a push is valid or not, should it succeed... the rough men threatening violence won't be coming to force you to buy something... but they will come to stop those from offering you a product that…

How would you even begin to imagine a free market around this? To get even the slightest approximation you’d first need to abolish copyright and patents and any other distortions enabling hoarding of imaginary capital, probably need to take a stab at the very definition of a corporation even.

Whatever market there is to speak of currently has very little resemblance to a free market in any case.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#169

Post by kmlx »

arkades wrote: post #82
kmlx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What ad networks do is the digital equivalent of filming and spying on people who walk by your storefront. What they do, how they do it and the effects it has on society are wrong. wait a minute. i know there are currently startups that offer this exact type of analytics. and from what i know these types of analytics are extremely beneficial to both consumers and store owners. what exactly is the problem here?

> extremely beneficial to both consumers What "extreme benefits" do I derive from being filmed and analyzed by stores I happen to walk past?

you get better products. the store gets better sales. it's a win win all around.

this is already happening and it's already providing value.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#170

Post by kmlx »

anoncake wrote: post #91
kmlx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What ad networks do is the digital equivalent of filming and spying on people who walk by your storefront. What they do, how they do it and the effects it has on society are wrong. wait a minute. i know there are currently startups that offer this exact type of analytics. and from what i know these types of analytics are extremely beneficial to both consumers and store owners. what exactly is the problem here?

If analytics are beneficial to customers, why aren't they opt-in but instead businesses try hard not to let them even opt out?

this question makes no sense.

since on street analytics are already beneficial to everyone, consumers and providers, why should they be opt-in? they should be, and currently are, automatic opt-in with an option to opt-out. you are walking on the street, so any privacy is gone just from walking outside of your home.

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