Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

solidproject.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 126 posts

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#61

Post by mikedc »

er4hn wrote: post #43
gklitt wrote: post #34

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://…

I think that with a problem statement of "I want to control my data and how third parties use my data" Solid makes a good deal of sense. Personal information should be owned by you and you should be able to take it from service to service as you see fit. The two problems that I find with Solid, based on my own limited understanding are as follows: (1) Services don't need to give back to Solid - Services, Facebook, yo…

One possible answer to both of your questions is "with legislation", and I feel like to some extent a tightening of the rules here is what Solid anticipates. Perhaps not to the point that we could expect the big players of today to adopt a platform like Solid, but perhaps where the companies of tomorrow looking to avoid the headaches of compliance see offloading data storage to a dedicated entity managed by the user as an appealing option.

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#62

Post by passive »

mawise wrote: post #42
passive wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That makes sense, but it also means the selling point is data portability more than data privacy/security. Since I would already need to give an application access to my data, I might as well have them host it for me. It still feels like Solid is a more complex and harder-to-reason-about solution to the same problem that GDPR data takeout tries to solve. Consistent open standards are nice, but it doesn't take that mu…

I think data portability is the most obvious value proposition for most people, especially between potentially hostile services (Facebook and Google Photos could easily inter-operate, but that's not something either company wants to invest in). For someone like me, who has moved a streaming music "collection" between 4 services over the past decade or so, it would have been real handy.

It also, conceptually at least, dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for new services in the same space, since they can use the existing data models and persistence layers.

The privacy aspects are secondary, at least to start, though I think the last few years have helped establish more context for them. Providing granular controls for data access in a common format across services seems like a big win, at least compared to my experience hunting through preferences/settings/account details/etc menus in Facebook and other places.

Finally, I think there's significant potential value in this being used as way to authenticate the source of media. As deepfakes are getting better and easier to create, having all the video and audio of you connected to a known identity seems like a necessity. Letting Facebook or Google be that identity provider would be very bad.

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#63

Post by er4hn »

alfonsodev wrote: post #53
er4hn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that with a problem statement of "I want to control my data and how third parties use my data" Solid makes a good deal of sense. Personal information should be owned by you and you should be able to take it from service to service as you see fit. The two problems that I find with Solid, based on my own limited understanding are as follows: (1) Services don't need to give back to Solid - Services, Facebook, yo…

The problem with Facebook is not that they are using user uploaded content, is that the user has no clue whatsoever the data is being collected by means of tracking actions (likes, time spend on a video...) and cross site tracking and what is going to be used for (Ads, make the site more addictive ?, recommendations?). It's an issue of collecting user generated data without awareness, and with lack of transparency, t…

You raise a good point - my example of asking if the user likes cats is something that could be an inferred metric based on their clicking on cat pictures and having lots of pictures of cats. It isn't the user data itself which Solid aims to control.

Trying to subdivide pods so that services map access from album A -> pod B and album B -> pod C sounds like a painful UX problem as well.. Do I place my ambient music in my music pod or my "office music" pod? Do I have a hierarchy of musical pods? I am joking a little, but it is a hard thing to have fit into an easy flow.

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#64

Post by er4hn »

mikedc wrote: post #61
er4hn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that with a problem statement of "I want to control my data and how third parties use my data" Solid makes a good deal of sense. Personal information should be owned by you and you should be able to take it from service to service as you see fit. The two problems that I find with Solid, based on my own limited understanding are as follows: (1) Services don't need to give back to Solid - Services, Facebook, yo…

One possible answer to both of your questions is "with legislation", and I feel like to some extent a tightening of the rules here is what Solid anticipates. Perhaps not to the point that we could expect the big players of today to adopt a platform like Solid, but perhaps where the companies of tomorrow looking to avoid the headaches of compliance see offloading data storage to a dedicated entity managed by the user…

I think that may be the answer! If data is toxic waste then offloading the storage of toxic waste may be the new way to focus on your "core competency" of running your service.

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#65

Post by dreamling »

I haven't looked into it for a couple years, I was initially very excited about the concept. TLDR: Unless the user experience/accessibility/hosting experience is improved, I just couldn't suggest anyone use it.

Last time I really dug in the user interface and accessibility concerns were not great.

I understand the idea was more about the data handling, and that anyone could produce something based off the framework but I had all sorts of issues with the login tokens/usability. (ie, if you logged in with the wrong cert it didn't have an easy way to clear it, and would 'log in' to an error page. ect. )

as far as I can tell, each pod/data host can run different versions of solid, so your experience may vary between them. You can self host as well.

I'd have to dig in again to see if things have gotten better, but I don't have time at the moment. on quick look, some of my data sites are no longer working. oh! link says it was shut down in oct. https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-solid/2020Oct/00...

That said, the community was pretty nice and willing to answer questions.

Maybe things have improved?

I was hoping that maybe they'd start using DAT as well, because it seemed like it might be nice to dovetail with some of the beakerbrowser/distributed web stuff going on. re @pfrazee

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#66

Post by eivarv »

I think it's important to point out (if only for end-users) that Solid puts your data "under your control" in the "allows you to authorize third party access to your data" – not in the "can actually control your data in practice, post-access".

It'll let you granularly authorize first party access what data you have in your pod, but there can’t be any technical guarantees with regards to illegitimate sharing or otherwise copying (many might at least cache, for instance) – nor about what is collected and shared outside this system. It's own documentation even states this, if you dig a little.

I keep seeing data-hubs and identity-providers touting themselves as solutions to the web's privacy issues, but I don't see how they actually solve anything. It seems like an attempted technical solution to a social problem to me.

The real problem with data how data is used these days is really that a bunch of data is collected opaquely, unethically, and in some cases illegally – and possibly shared. The whole system including data brokers and real time bidding is out of control.

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#67

Post by [deleted] »

gklitt wrote: post #34

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://…

[deleted]

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#68

Post by sbazerque »

gklitt wrote: post #34

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://…

Look at Hyper Hyper Space!

https://github.com/hyperhyperspace

Its goals are similar, the approach is more pragmatic (p2p data layer using standard web browsers and webrtc).

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#69

Post by dang »

If curious see also

2019 (a bit) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20017493

2019 (a bit) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20617506

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100895

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355311

2018 (a bit) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18119227

2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280764

Others?

Re: Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

#70

Post by zepatrik »

angst_ridden wrote: post #52

What Solid really needs to do is create a page that I could show to my nontechnical friends where it explains how it works and what services/sites support it. Without those two things being front and center, I can't see Solid being anything more than a niche interest for technical folks.

I think the problem there is that there is not much to show. But it will require that page at some point. Maybe it would help now as well as managers and other "decision makers" might understand it more. And they have to implement it in the end right?
Post reply on HN