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

Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

blog.muni.town

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 287 posts

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#211

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

mariusor wrote: post #108
InMice wrote: post #26

Among the first page and 2nd page (top 60) there is always atleast 1 post about how we're gonnna "take back the web" or make it back into some form of our 90s millenial nostalgia memories, self hosting, federated this or that, etc etc. Meanwhile - Nothing changes, everything generally gets worse and younger generations come into the world with no memories of the 90s internet or the world before mobile devices or surv…

> Meanwhile - Nothing changes Well, TFA, and sibling posts to mine, point out some ways in which federated networks are leading the change in this direction. I would add that alongside SOLID and the AT Protocol, ActivityPub also encourages people taking ownership of their own data. So probably you need to focus your attention to where the change happens instead of waiting for large, ad filled, for profit networks to…

I think I agree. I know I started re-evaluating my internet presence as a whole. I accept that a lot can't or won't do much, but the same was true, when firefox was new and no one wanted to jump ship, but the people, who liked privacy focus and extensions. Those that can, will move. The herd will follow if they see it can work.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#212

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

carefulfungi wrote: post #64
jstummbillig wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing changes because the ask is silly and disconnected from the reality of normal people's lives. So what happens if Google has all your data? To the best of my observations over the past 20 years: best in class services, cheap, paired with excellent security and data availability.

Exactly. "It's good for you and takes some effort" is a bad growth strategy. For this movement to win, something will have to replace social media and walled gardens with a better dopamine hit, that just happens to keep data private.

I genuinely disagree. At this point, the only real way to make sure something like this stays worthwhile is when it is not 'super easy and convenient'. In other words, it has to take effort ( and obviously right now it does take effort and that effort ranks close to 'impossible' --- that should be pared down a bit ).

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#213

Post by crazygringo »

sowbug wrote: post #182
crazygringo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From there, I guess its not that hard to demonstrate which 3rd party sold your data and sue them. But it doesn't? Obviously every site's TOS will say that by providing them with your data they can use it for all sorts of purposes. If you sued, you'd lose. And you're generally going to want to make your data available to the various services requesting it, because otherwise most people won't see your posts and comme…

Your site, the source of the data, could also include a TOS. Plenty of working examples in the commercial world where licensees are allowed to use data but not compile or resell it.

So I actually started researching this, and it turns out that, by the principles in Field v. Google Inc. (2006), neither side would have an enforceable TOS, but that a user making their social data available on their host and not attempting to block any particular crawlers with robots.txt would create an implied license that would allow social media sites to store and display the posts. Which is what allows Google to display information, snippets, and images from sites it crawls.

Facebook couldn't enforce a TOS because the hosting user had never gone to facebook.com and created an account, so the user never agreed to a contract. But a user couldn't enforce a TOS either because the crawling was automated, so Facebook wouldn't be agreeing to a contract either. But Facebook would be allowed to use the data because that's what a user is inviting by making it publicly available to crawlers and not doing anything to restrict access to Facebook.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#214

Post by basilikum »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #180
jodrellblank wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " As if ideologically non-paying customers have a voice worth listening to. " Do people who ideologically refuse to spend money on meat-foods have nothing worth listening to about animal welfare? Who don't spend money on airline flights have nothing worth listening to about climate change? Who avoid companies which use slave labour in their supply chains have nothing worth listening to about human rights? 'Money ta…

The thing is that they still use the services/products. It's just ad-blocking and piracy. So to follow your analogy, they eat meat by stealing it, and feel like they are sending a message about animal welfare.

The only reason why I ever use these services is because they killed off any alternatives through anti competitive practices. And I hate it every time because they are awful and disrespect me every single millimeter of the way.

You are arguing on the premise that ads would somehow be a fair exchange. That is simply the opposite of the truth. Ads are parasitic. Services with ads are almost always worse than services without, not just by having ads but also in every other way. Ads do not incentive quality, they incentive treating your users as prey and feeding them SEO slop.

I want to compensate people for actual beneficial work they do. But with most for profit internet services that is simply not possible. If you give them a finger they will take your whole arm. For exampme I want to buy good movies. But I simply cannot. All I can "buy" is a pinky promise from them to let me watch a movie under their conditions which they can change at any time under their sole discretion and they can just revoke that possibility for me completely at any time. Would I pay for Netflix they would only give me 720p no matter how much money I give them, because I have to much control over my own hardware for them.

There are exceptions to this that I happily pay for, but those are all niche services that cater to the small group of people like me.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#215

Post by abetusk »

InMice wrote: post #26

Among the first page and 2nd page (top 60) there is always atleast 1 post about how we're gonnna "take back the web" or make it back into some form of our 90s millenial nostalgia memories, self hosting, federated this or that, etc etc. Meanwhile - Nothing changes, everything generally gets worse and younger generations come into the world with no memories of the 90s internet or the world before mobile devices or surv…

In general, I think these types of sticky behaviors only change when there's an application that people gravitate towards with the changing behavior embedded.

One such candidate is cryptocurrency and personal finances. The cryptocurrency wallet will necessarily need to be cryptographically secure, so this at least provides an opening for privacy. Tying it to finances means that there's an immediate application, payment processing, that people might want to use and put up with clunky behavior, at least initially.

All this lacks specificity and finances, cryptocurrency or no, bring their own drawbacks, but it does seem like it's possible to me.

The Internet's attention can be fickle and it's easy to forget that sometimes. IBM used to be a titan before Microsoft supplanted it. Proprietary server operating system, including web servers and databases used to deeply embedded until they were supplanted by FOSS alternatives. Digg, Friendster, Myspace, Yahoo, etc. used to fixtures of the Internet until they weren't.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#216

Post by jbeninger »

ianopolous wrote: post #194
jbeninger wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're still missing an "open social" closed social network. Something like old-Facebook where you can post to an intimate audience of friends and family, and your feed isn't stuffed full of ads and influencers. Just a little private windows into your friends' lives. That feels like something that could displace other social media in a way that's difficult for for-profit businesses to replicate since it goes a…

You may like Peergos (creator here) https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media

That looks really promising. It checks a lot of the boxes I already had in mind for such a system, like being able to continue a thread without exposing the whole thing to untrusted parties

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#217

Post by ianopolous »

jbeninger wrote: post #216
ianopolous wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may like Peergos (creator here) https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media

That looks really promising. It checks a lot of the boxes I already had in mind for such a system, like being able to continue a thread without exposing the whole thing to untrusted parties

Thanks! You can play around with it on https://peergos-demo.net

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#218

Post by g4k »

brendoncarroll wrote: post #114

I work on a FOSS project in this space, Blobcache. https://github.com/blobcache/blobcache Trusting a server to store an application's state is a different thing from trusting it to author changes or to read the data. Servers should become dumber, and clients should become smarter. When I use an app, I want the app to load E2E encrypted state from storage (possibly on another machine, possibly not owned by me) make wh…

There is also https://remotestorage.io/ for per-user storage.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#219

Post by ben_w »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #205
arrosenberg wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to (once again) define “free” pricing models as predatory and broadly outlaw them. They distort the idea of a free and fair marketplace by poisoning consumer expectations of what things should cost.

> We need to (once again) define “free” pricing models as predatory and broadly outlaw them Free services funded by ads have been a boon for the poor.

That rips off the advertisers and/or leaves the poor poorer.

For any given ad supported service, one of two things must be true:

(1) the ad spend was more than or equal to the cost of the service for those users

(2) the ad spend was less than the cost of the service for those users

From fork (2), it follows that the service isn't sustainable anyway.

From fork (1), it follows that the buyers of the ad slots in turn only make a profit if those ads led to sales higher than the ad spend.

But for any given poor person, buying that which was advertised on the ad supported service necessarily means spending more than they would have on a non-ad-supported version of the same ad supported services.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#220

Post by rglullis »

watwut wrote: post #159
xp84 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this posted from a Brussels IP? This certainly seems to reflect how the EU regulators see themselves, but I haven't met many real Europeans who have themselves realized any actual value coming from their laughable, vague attempts at legislating the problems away. The best they've managed is making some Europeans smug, but their data still exists in all the same places. Worst case a few fines get levied, for megac…

So, if Europeans think these rules improved the situation, they are smug and dont count. Frankly, in here EU did a good job, certainly better then USA does. It would be neat if USA made similar laws too. Megacorps do get bigger fines then small companies, actually. Megacorps existence is also literally result of winner takes all and rich are untouchable legal system cranked to 11 Americans are proud of.

> Frankly, in here EU did a good job

People in the EU are still using Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp. Zuckerberg did a "ok, if you don't want us to track you, you can pay 12€/month" and everyone just smashed the "I consent to get my data mined forever" button.

Not to mention that we *still* have lobbying for chat control.

Every measure from the EU is, as always, meant to look like our beloved bureaucrats are doing something but absolute ineffective at changing the status quo.

Post reply on HN