41–50 of 126 posts
Is this related to Jaron Lanier's vision of union (in the labor sense) groups which sell to companies access to the group's anonymized data? In his model, one individual can belong to many groups and their information is like a share/stock they have in a pool of data with other people. They sell in a cooperative fashion to select companies, gaining power through anonymity and group bargaining power.
I've never seen a compelling explanation of how this is supposed to work. Do people self-host their pods? Is the pod one more thing to sign up with an external provider? If I'm self-hosting my pod anyway, then wouldn't I want my self-hosting to include the (for example) photo-library viewing layer instead of giving google photos or flickr access to the photos in my pod? If I did give them access, then how is it more…
The hosting story is still a little messy, but in my version of this, I think it needs a trusted third-party to offer hosting, along with an open committee to manage the data specifications. The advantages of separating data storage from usage are similar to those in application development. If you have a robust model for defining and retrieving your data, the tools for working with that data can be iterated on indep…
If the only real problem that Solid solves is "I loose my data if provider X locks me out or goes bankrupt", then it isn't even good enough since the third-party pod-hosting company can have the same failure mode. Maybe we should expand on GDPR data takeout legislation to require something like API-driven access that would allow people/companies to build automated backup/export solutions.
That becomes a much simpler thing to build and get buy-in for instead of a whole new paradigm which companies aren't incentivized to follow and is hard for users to understand.
1) I am a big fan of the general philosophy of Solid. But as others have mentioned, I've found it extremely difficult to understand specifics of the proposal or to see concrete progress, based on publicly available resources. The best place I've found is Ruben Verborgh's blog (he's a researcher who's affiliated with Solid). For example here's a nice post which goes into more detail on the ideas behind Solid: https://…
(1) Services don't need to give back to Solid - Services, Facebook, your medical provider, whatever else you are using, does not have a clear incentive to provide their own data on you back to your Solid pod. It is far easier for them to keep it: it lets them do offline processing, and it keeps you more locked into their service. I'm not sure how one would solve this issue.
(2) Much like mobile apps with excessive permissions and the abuse of tracking elements - I don't see how Solid prevents the abuse of its service. If Solid catches on and Facebook has a permissions check saying "Let Facebook do 'SELECT * FROM .;' on your Solid data, how many people will click yes? Even if you request it each time, once the data is copied out, it is out there and can be packaged and resold, used to build advertising profiles, etc. You're back to the original problem of not being able to limit access to your data, but with extra steps. Where I think this could be solved is by Solid not providing the data directly, but by being a service which can answer queries. Queries could be items such as "Does user like cats? y/n/m". Or it could be something like "Here is an anonymized dataset being built out. Please add your input to it." Replies to queries could also have an amount of deliberately wrong or misleading answers given, depending on the service and endpoint to obfuscate your personal data on places that don't need it. While this can still be abused, it raises the bar for abuse.
To me the whole pitch is a bit too nebulous and seemingly inconsistent. What does it mean with "portable" and "interoperable" data standards? Does that mean specific file formats? Protocols? Apps? What do they mean with "Linked Data"? What's novel about this, what makes it different from hyperlinks or shared Dropbox folders? Why does it say pods are decentralized data stores, but then on the "about" page it tells me…
Linked Data itself is not novel: https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/data
> In December 2019, Google and Facebook proudly announced a major milestone, which was echoed in news media all around the world: it is now possible to copy a picture from Facebook to Google Photos. This news came in mere months after we celebrated the 50th anniversary of another technological feat: the moon landing of 20 July 1969, when millions of households witnessed Neil Armstrong take a giant leap for mankind.
> So let me get this straight: two of the largest tech companies in history make headlines because in 2019, they move a single photo over the whopping distance of 11 km it takes from the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park to the Googleplex in Mountain View, whereas in 1969, we sent live video signals from 380,000 km away on the actual moon?
> If those two companies, both widely hailed as pinnacles of technology, genuinely consider this to be innovation they are proud of, the only logical conclusion is that data-driven innovation today is fundamentally broken.
> The problem is widespread and not limited to technology or social media. Any sector that requires personal data to deliver services, from retail over insurance to health, suffers from the damaging effects of siloization. Companies increasingly need more access to data, but they won’t get there if they keep on collecting that data themselves.[...]
0. https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2020/12/07/a-data-ecosystem-...
Is this related to Jaron Lanier's vision of union (in the labor sense) groups which sell to companies access to the group's anonymized data? In his model, one individual can belong to many groups and their information is like a share/stock they have in a pool of data with other people. They sell in a cooperative fashion to select companies, gaining power through anonymity and group bargaining power.
I self-host via a 1T SD card in my phone (encrypted). Why pull from/risk "the cloud" when I can have my stuff on me in the first place?
So if you lose your phone, you lose all your data? (asking in a genuine manner)
Although Solid is a better technical idea, I'm not sure how the migration from PHP/MySQL would work. Nobody on the Solid forum replied to my post asking about it. Another guy, Chagai, is pushing for Matrix and the fediverse. Ultimately, there's many great technical ideas, but the real solution doesn't lie in writing code - it's in building the community.
Therefore I'm trying harder to create more activity in BeWelcome's existing community (which is hard when nobody's travelling), like an online meetup every Thursday. If it gets critical mass, I believe it could be as widespread as Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap (which it models in org structure). I wish that Solid could be a part of it, but that requires active developers, and currently it's hard enough to find someone willing to make an API or native iOS app, never mind a breaking back-end change that people aren't asking for.
Love the idea but how does Solid prevent any malicious actor from over time replicating all the data that user authorize into a centralized repository - in this case, it only makes it even easier for data consolidation.