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Solid Project: All of your data, under your control

solidproject.org

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

#71

Post by dreamling »

dreamling wrote: post #65

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 b…

quick followup, after checking my old links and making a new sign up. it does seem like the inrupt.com pod has a bit better /more up to date design. Accessibility, while not perfect, does seem to be improved. (quick WAVE tool check)

Things are still fairly confusing for new users though. And some how tos I wrote down from then no longer work. Which is not the worst thing, as some of the tutorials required you to hover over and wait to be able to edit things.

Much easier to look at though. ymmv

for historical/hysterical reference, I uploaded my old solid adventuress file, it is not up to date, and some of the css is not always showing the right colors, ect.

but you can see some of the directions I was looking into then: https://pod.inrupt.com/metahari/public/solidnotes/SolidAdven...

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

#73

Post by cratermoon »

passive wrote: post #62
mawise wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The privacy aspects need more attention. There does need to be a neutral and trusted identity provider. It should be possible for the pod owner to control access via some kind of scope/role/policy setup. That's going to be complicated for most people. Using an example from elsewhere in this thread, I probably would want PhotoShop to be able to have full access to many (but not all) images my pod, but Instagram should really only be able to read the images I want to post there.

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

#74

Post by bachmeier »

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…

> 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?).

I'd say the two biggest questions that outweigh any others are:

Who will access the data?

What will they do with it?

The problem is that few of us know how our data is being used against us. "We will use the latest artificial intelligence methods to convince you that [political issue] is a good thing, since you're just on the other side of the fence."

The key thing you didn't mention is who the data will be sold to. I doubt the extremist nonsense, not related at all to any videos I've watched, creeps into my YouTube recommendations by accident. Who's paying them to generate clicks and viewing hours? What conversion are they attempting with my information? Only one side understands this game. Is there any justification for not having to reveal who paid them for my information or my clicks?

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

#75

Post by Nasrudith »

fuzzybear3965 wrote: post #38

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.

Data in those contexts nearly always have "reciprocial actions" fundamentally and those who gather the data know what they actually want out of it. Company-user interactions would likely produce better data. It feels like half of an understanding of both data usage and union style collective barganing.

Unless I am missing something it seems a bit like trying to combine a semitruck and a bicycle to get green bulk cargo transportation. Sure both things individually have these advantages and it would be great to have all in one but implementing it is fundamentally nonviable.

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

#76

Post by anderspitman »

Solid is awesome and I'm bullish on this model in the long-run, but it seems to be caught in a classic chicken/egg problem. Nobody is going to use it until there are good apps. and nobody is going to make good apps until there is a market of users. IMO this is the same problem that kept Sandstorm and remoteStorage from getting big.

I see 2 solutions currently:

1. Make an awesome storage product, that just happens to implement Solid. It might have to start out also implementing S3, which unfortunately doesn't support OAuth, which basically kills it for apps. You could try making it compatible with another proprietary protocol like Google Drive, or provide a frontend library that easily talks to all the major cloud storage providers, plus Solid...

2. Take the slow track. If developers themselves want to use it, they'll write useful open source apps over time. This can take forever though. Even after 30 years there are still large feature gaps on Linux because the market is too small to attract big app developers.

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

#77

Post by anderspitman »

cratermoon wrote: post #73
passive wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The privacy aspects need more attention. There does need to be a neutral and trusted identity provider. It should be possible for the pod owner to control access via some kind of scope/role/policy setup. That's going to be complicated for most people. Using an example from elsewhere in this thread, I probably would want PhotoShop to be able to have full access to many (but not all) images my pod, but Instagram should…

I think federated identity is the way to go. Technically that's what we have now, ie every identity provider I'm aware of lets you reset your password via email, which is federated.

But we tried federated and users didn't care. They want convenience. Maybe with privacy apparently picking up some public interest, we can try again.

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

#78

Post by anderspitman »

gameman144 wrote: post #51

How does this work in practice, I didn't see a worked example on the site. For instance, say I give Solid Social access to my contacts and my photos. At that point, Solid Social can access all my contacts and photos, copy them, and then do whatever they please with them (even if I later revoke permissions). In the current web, I upload my photos to a website, which I then trust not to use them inappropriately. In the…

Solid is just the technical part. You're also going to need the regulatory part that says it's illegal for a company stores data after you revoke access.

But the technical part is still necessary.

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

#79

Post by anderspitman »

kevincox wrote: post #37

Reminds me of https://remotestorage.io/ which I have used in a (mostly personal) website. I like that I can provide a service as a static website, and users pay for, manage and have control over their own storage. One of the things that could help it bootstrap is that they also support client-side Google Drive and Dropbox shims, so users who want to use something else can, but most users will just use one or the othe…

I actually started working on just such a shim yesterday. The idea is to represent all major cloud storage through a single simple frontend API. You have to implement each provider's OAuth flow, but once you have the files it's pretty much the same.

Dropbox, Google, and my own protocol[0] will come first, but Solid is planned eventually.

What I've learned so far:

* Google is extremely draconian unless you use their JavaScript picker. To really integrate nicely you would have to spend at least $15000-$75000 getting your app audited by a 3rd party.

* Dropbox picker integration is very easy and slick.

[0]: https://github.com/gemdrive

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

#80

Post by anderspitman »

smm11 wrote: post #21

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?

Something like Solid is more useful if you want to share data with other people, or use apps that only support cloud storage. There are many such apps (Google Docs for example), but most of them are currently embedded in their respective cloud storage provider. Solid decouples the apps from the storage.
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