A Personal API • Hacker News Board

Re: A Personal API

#51

Post by naveenium » Fri, May 31, 2013, 7:36 PM UTC

rasur wrote: post #34

abraininavat wrote: post #13

I was about to dismiss this but have thought about it a bit more, and there's something interesting here. There are already APIs built on top of you. There are the ones you know about, like Facebook and Twitter. There are the ones we know exist but have no direct access to, such as Amazon's backend or your police record. And there are the ones we may never know about, such as the NSA bot scanning this post right now…

Have you read Jaron Laniers new book "Who Owns the Future"? You have similar ideas ("Imagine if the wealth of data collected about you all went to one place, and, most importantly, was controlled by you. Imagine if Company X had to pay you to know about your Amazon spending habits instead of paying Amazon.") It's a thought provoking book.. and slightly worrisome to boot (about the state of things at the moment, with…

yes, i do think of it that way: as we leave all this data exhaust behind us, i keep wanting a system to have it all in one place – or at least, an "interface" that shows it to me in one place, even if that's not how the backend really is.

thanks for the book recommendation - i will check it out this weekend!

Re: A Personal API

#52

Post by naveenium » Fri, May 31, 2013, 7:38 PM UTC

abraininavat wrote: post #39

jckt wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1, but do you mind expanding on " discoverability "?

I'm no expert, but it occurs to me that a mountain of data coming in from disparate sources needs the concept of discoverability to be adequately used. That is, there has to be a way for a machine to find occurrences of data that it cares about without specifically knowing the exact attributes of the data. A simple example off the top of my head. Let's say there's a popular app that collects your pulse from your cell…

couldn't one also keep track of the 'source' from where a data point comes (i do this, but don't reveal it in the API - yet)? this way, when it comes to discoverability via some algorithm, you could always separate the 'verified' bucket from the 'unknown' bucket?

Re: A Personal API

#53

Post by jtchang » Fri, May 31, 2013, 7:41 PM UTC

I like the idea of this. I know there was a post recently about a guy selling 24 hour chunks of data about himself.

Is there an opportunity here to create a secure data store for your own structured data hosted securely somewhere else and that providers would pay YOU to access?

Of course you'd give free access to it for your doctor who needed to pull some info. But what if you had total control over your own API. This is a kind of like Facebook but I would never let facebook hold some of my most personal data. I would like to control authorization to my own data though to certain people.

Re: A Personal API

#54

Post by naveenium » Fri, May 31, 2013, 7:42 PM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #29

I've been spending a bit of time thinking about this lately, too. Here are the things that I think need to be answered for this to be truly useful. * Secure access. It's great you decided to share everything publicly. I'm looking at fairly confidential data like blood tests, though. * How do you express permissions? It's likely you'd give out sets of data, not per-url permissions. (I.e. my photos from date A to date…

you're totally right on all these points: for the time being, i've only put out information that's okay being 'public', but i imagine when you do want to share a set with a small group (let's say your physicians), you'll want an additional layer of access control.

Re: A Personal API

#55

Post by randomchars » Fri, May 31, 2013, 7:42 PM UTC

whazzmaster wrote: post #40

kmax12 wrote: post #18

Such an api sort of already exists in the form of Fitbit's api which can be found at http://dev.fitbit.com/ . Fitbit holds a lot of the data hostage, but it's at least something that anyone wearing a Fitbit can easily grant access to.

What data do they hold hostage?

It was on HN[0] a few months ago that they don't give you access to minute by minute data, only daily totals.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5001301

Re: A Personal API

#56

Post by klenwell » Fri, May 31, 2013, 7:44 PM UTC

fosk wrote: post #46

abraininavat wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert, but it occurs to me that a mountain of data coming in from disparate sources needs the concept of discoverability to be adequately used. That is, there has to be a way for a machine to find occurrences of data that it cares about without specifically knowing the exact attributes of the data. A simple example off the top of my head. Let's say there's a popular app that collects your pulse from your cell…

If I understand correctly, isn't this the purpose of a good documentation?

It's more about money. This data is worth a lot of money to marketers, retailers, pharmaceutical companies, etc. They have no incentive to share it freely or, I suspect, at a price reasonable to most individual consumers. (Maybe I'm wrong here?)

There was that interesting article a while back about how Target was able to figure out a teenage girl was pregnant before her own father did:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

It glosses this point:

Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.)

I'd be very curious, and a little scared, to see all this kind of information collected on me.

Re: A Personal API

#57

Post by naveenium » Fri, May 31, 2013, 7:45 PM UTC

platz wrote: post #15

Please include the units in the results!

a good idea. for now, i left everything metric, but have thought about dropping in the units.

Re: A Personal API

#58

Post by naveenium » Fri, May 31, 2013, 7:47 PM UTC

tejaswiy wrote: post #6

I've actually been toying with the idea of having a private facebook account to hold all this data and more. Facebook's pretty much become the default social layer these days and almost every app can publish data to your news feed. Facebook also has a pretty cool Timeline UI to boot which will probably only get better as time passes.

that's a really interesting concept

you could probably do it today without the use of a private account

i believe in app settings, you can restrict the visibility of posts by any particular app. this way, your scale's posts could be seen by just you and not your friends.

Re: A Personal API

#59

Post by revorad » Fri, May 31, 2013, 7:51 PM UTC

taylorwc wrote: post #43

revorad wrote: post #33

This is awesome. I've also been working on a personal data dashboard app, which is similar. It pulls in data from various social and fitness app APIs. You can also enter in data manually. It's mainly for viewing the data and trends, but I'll add an API too if there's demand. Is anyone interested in using my dashboard app?

yes - want to explore

Great, can you please drop me an email (see profile) with some details on what data you're interested in tracking?

Re: A Personal API

#60

Post by naveenium » Fri, May 31, 2013, 7:59 PM UTC

jckt wrote: post #32

Interesting. I think the real challenge behind this though, is not the API itself, but that for it to be really useful there has to be some sort of semi-automated form of data collection, that can be generally applied. Relevant: http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytic...

you're totally right

this is why i believe a smart scale is one of the best examples of good data tracking: you step on it whenever you think of it (not on some weird schedule; nor do you have to wear it or take it with you). it does the mundane stuff of capturing the data and sending it to the cloud, which you would otherwise have to write into some notebook.

if it's a system that's fully automated though, one might lose interest in collecting it in the first place: the QSers always like to say – when you add a little friction to a process, you end up paying more attention to why it is. so instead of just blinding capturing your weight, setting up alerts for goals and seeing trends fall and rise will get you to make the most of the data – instead of just collecting data for data's sake.