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Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data

nytimes.com

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data

#21

Post by BlueTemplar »

kvark wrote: post #20
eivarv wrote: post #14

Interesting in a technological sense, but what problem it solves isn’t obvious to me. It lets me granularly authorize first party access what data I have in my 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. I keep seeing data-hubs and identity-providers to…

Maybe we need a quantum leap in technology first? Operating on data that can't be immutably copied (i.e. quantum state) opens up interesting possibilities in privacy space.

How? The 3rd parties will still need to copy the data, even temporarily, to be able to do anything with it.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data

#22

Post by BlueTemplar »

wcerfgba wrote: post #13

I'm glad TBL is working on this stuff, but at this point I can't help but feel like this is doomed to a very slow uptake, like how Semantic Web and IPv6 are still emerging technologies. I am reminded of esr on Plan 9: > Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: The most dangerous enemy of a bett…

It ultimately depends on the governments. They have been quite proactive in mandating the end of some technologies in the fields of TV and light bulbs. Not sure why they are dragging their feets so much with IPv6, now that it has finally been finalized in 2017, and even Europe ran out of IPv4 addresses in 2020 ?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data

#24

Post by pogorniy »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #19

> “This technology could unlock an enormous amount of innovation,” potentially becoming a new platform as the iPhone was for smartphone apps, he said. "Platforms", aka "Minitels 2.0"¤ are what is wrong today with the Web specifically, and the state of today's infocom technologies in general. The whole point of Tim's "pods", is that just like the WWW, they aren't going to be just another private, centralized platform.…

> The whole point of Tim's "pods", is that just like the WWW, they aren't going to be just another private, centralized platform.

Difference is that pods operate on top of open protocols for storing and accessing data. This means that you can stop hosting your pod and move data to another hoster of pods.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data

#25

Post by Vinnl »

eivarv wrote: post #14

Interesting in a technological sense, but what problem it solves isn’t obvious to me. It lets me granularly authorize first party access what data I have in my 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. I keep seeing data-hubs and identity-providers to…

In my (personal) view, it's the technical part of a solution that definitely also needs to have a social/legislative component. It cannot prevent parties from illegitimate sharing of my data, but it does give them the option to hand over control to me. There are lots of companies that currently hold data on us but for whom that data is not their primary competency, and they only need a small nudge (like GDPR) to make having the customer responsible for that data an attractive proposition.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data

#27

Post by Vinnl »

pents90 wrote: post #8
gnarbarian wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How do you grant a company access to your data but prevent them from storing it? Outlaw it. >And how does it apply to data a company generates about me? You store it on a server you control, then provide access to 3rd parties. This is how https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/ is setup to work.

Ok, so it’s more of a legal framework than a technological one.

I see it as technology that enables the legal framework.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data

#29

Post by eivarv »

Vinnl wrote: post #25
eivarv wrote: post #14

Interesting in a technological sense, but what problem it solves isn’t obvious to me. It lets me granularly authorize first party access what data I have in my 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. I keep seeing data-hubs and identity-providers to…

In my (personal) view, it's the technical part of a solution that definitely also needs to have a social/legislative component. It cannot prevent parties from illegitimate sharing of my data, but it does give them the option to hand over control to me. There are lots of companies that currently hold data on us but for whom that data is not their primary competency, and they only need a small nudge (like GDPR) to make…

You might be right, but I think it's disingenuous to market it as though this "solves privacy". Worst case, people are lulled into a false sense of security.

Data-storage + authorization doesn't solve any (new) technical privacy-issues; this is "data protection" rather than "data privacy" in my book.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data

#30

Post by westurner »

eivarv wrote: post #29
Vinnl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my (personal) view, it's the technical part of a solution that definitely also needs to have a social/legislative component. It cannot prevent parties from illegitimate sharing of my data, but it does give them the option to hand over control to me. There are lots of companies that currently hold data on us but for whom that data is not their primary competency, and they only need a small nudge (like GDPR) to make…

You might be right, but I think it's disingenuous to market it as though this "solves privacy". Worst case, people are lulled into a false sense of security. Data-storage + authorization doesn't solve any (new) technical privacy-issues; this is "data protection" rather than "data privacy" in my book.

While I recognize the value of W3C LDP and SOLID, I also fail to see anything in SOLID that prevents B from sharing A's now pod-siloed information.

Does it prevent screenshots and OCR?

So it's in standard record structs and that makes it harder for the bad guys?

Who moderates mean memes with my face on them?

It is my hope that future Linked Data spec tutorials model something benign like shapes or cells instead of people: so that we can still see the value.

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