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Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

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

#231

Post by nayuki »

> Data Ownership as a conversation changes when data resides primarily with people-governed institutions rather than corporations.

This is a false contrast. Corporations are institutions governed by people - specifically a board of directors, elected by shareholders. They aren't governed by aliens nor are they self-sentient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution#Examples , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution#Examples

Perhaps you meant that you are against for-profit corporations where the customer (who stores data) has no vote in the operation of the corporation? If so, then say that and don't imply it.

People often use "corporation" as a pejorative, often in contrast to individual people. But they forget that a corporation is composed of people and ultimately owned by (some) people - but the kind of people that the writer does not like (shareholders, profit-makers, etc.).

> Notice that Alice’s handle is now @alice.com.

It's funny you're using .com as the example, because:

> The domain com is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Created in the first group of Internet domains in March of 1985, its name is derived from the word commercial, indicating its original intended purpose for subdomains registered by commercial organizations. Later, the domain opened for general purposes. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com

Even when you're arguing against commercial organizations for storing personal data. Now you're just naming individual people as if they were companies.

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

#232

Post by ranger_danger »

immibis wrote: post #195
jon-wood wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what? There are people with guns preventing us from self hosting websites? That’s certainly news to me.

Not simple website hosting, but if you want to do something like running social media, there are a bunch of regulations in the way that used to not exist, and regulations are enforced by people with guns (who are called police officers).

> regulations are enforced by people with guns

In what country?

In all the ones I know of, regulations are enforced by courts, without the use of guns or violence.

Posting these kinds of hot takes every day are probably why you got shadowbanned.

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

#233

Post by HenriTEL »

nayuki wrote: post #231

> Data Ownership as a conversation changes when data resides primarily with people-governed institutions rather than corporations. This is a false contrast. Corporations are institutions governed by people - specifically a board of directors, elected by shareholders. They aren't governed by aliens nor are they self-sentient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution#Examples , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutio…

To be fair nowadays .com refer much more to the default, main or official domain of an entity. Say you know the name of a non corporate website, are going to try .com first of something else?

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

#234

Post by ineptech »

gcanyon wrote: post #45

Both of these proposals (as far as I've read them, YMMV) fail the evolutionary test. At the scale we're talking about, ideas must proceed as evolution does: not with a far-away goal in mind, but with incremental changes, each of which individually must be an improvement over the status quo. We are at (near) a significant local maximum, and (again, as far as I've read, which is not all of it for sure) the people pitch…

The realistic path off looks like this, I think:

* I use Bluesky to chat as a Twitter replacement, which gets me into the Fediverse and gets me a PDS

* I use my PDS to store my payment details, giving me a (at first client-side) way to submit stored payment details that feels similar to storing it in the browser, but stores it in my "server"

* From there, it's a natural step to giving the retailer a token that can be used to pull payment details from my PDS; early adopter retailers are incentivized to do this because it frees them from the burden of storing and updating PII/PCI

* After some subset of users and retailers do this, users see the benefit of controlling their data as a viable alternative to some of the worst user-hostile patterns, e.g. the New York Times' "we don't have a cancel subscription page, you have to call an 800 number" nonsense.

* To the extent that storing PCI/PII in a PDS is as easy as storing it in the browser but with perceived additional benefits, user demand drives wider adoption

* Once it's technically feasible for sites to maintain their business model without storing any PII/PCI, it is much more realistic to write laws that proscribe it effectively for those users who choose that

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

#235

Post by sudahtigabulan »

senordevnyc wrote: post #225
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.9% of BlueSky users use only Bluesky services. But BlueSky has a Personal Data Service for each. That means: Those users have credible exit to take their data off BlueSky's hosting to someplace else (and as of a week or two ago to move back to BlueSky if they want). Those users can put whatever kind of data they want in their PDS. They can host their git data via https://tangled.org . They can store their music li…

99.9% of BlueSky users use only Bluesky services. I highly, highly doubt this, even in the narrowest sense of how many BlueSky users still actively post on X.

I think by "Bluesky services" PP meant atproto services, like PDS. Not social networks.

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

#236

Post by XorNot »

HenriTEL wrote: post #233
nayuki wrote: post #231

> Data Ownership as a conversation changes when data resides primarily with people-governed institutions rather than corporations. This is a false contrast. Corporations are institutions governed by people - specifically a board of directors, elected by shareholders. They aren't governed by aliens nor are they self-sentient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution#Examples , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutio…

To be fair nowadays .com refer much more to the default, main or official domain of an entity. Say you know the name of a non corporate website, are going to try .com first of something else?

Yeah it strikes me that basically .com will eventually get canonically termed to mean "common" since that's how it's actually used.

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

#237

Post by jauntywundrkind »

sudahtigabulan wrote: post #235
senordevnyc wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.9% of BlueSky users use only Bluesky services. I highly, highly doubt this, even in the narrowest sense of how many BlueSky users still actively post on X.

I think by "Bluesky services" PP meant atproto services, like PDS. Not social networks.

Yes, Bluesky as their only service provider when using atproto stuff.

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

#238

Post by mjevans »

oblio wrote: post #178
mjevans wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the things you describe are achieved via 'bouncers' or dedicated clients living in a server that an impermanent consumption device like a mobile phone might be able to connect to. No, they're not native to the protocol, nor are they required. However it's an open protocol. You are free to pick from a number of solutions that compose that goal.

I don't want to compose anything and neither does 99% of the world. It's a non solution and we're having the Dropbox announcement discussion 15 years later.

Then buy from a commercial service, just like many do for email. (Many more just use gmail in that context.)

Commercial IRC services? IRC Cloud comes to mind as one I've seen others use. Couldn't tell you how much it costs, how good it is, or if it leaks data.

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

#239

Post by immibis »

ranger_danger wrote: post #232
immibis wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not simple website hosting, but if you want to do something like running social media, there are a bunch of regulations in the way that used to not exist, and regulations are enforced by people with guns (who are called police officers).

> regulations are enforced by people with guns In what country? In all the ones I know of, regulations are enforced by courts, without the use of guns or violence. Posting these kinds of hot takes every day are probably why you got shadowbanned.

All of them that I'm aware of. There's generally a series of escalating actions, the last few of which involve direct physical violence against you. The only reason to comply with any of the earlier stages is the threat of direct physical violence from the later stages if you don't. Without that threat, the whole idea of being forced to do something collapses, since you can just completely ignore what the law is demanding you to do.

Sometimes the last stage in a chain of potential escalations is some kind of deprivation instead of violence. For example, if I get money taken from my bank account to pay a fine, and I only planned to use that money to buy a really big TV online, then now I don't get a really big TV, which is a punishment, but not a violent one.

But that's actually quite rare. It doesn't work with a brick-and-mortar store, because there would still be more stages of escalation available, where I could take the TV from the store without paying and then men with guns would come after me. It also doesn't work if I was going to buy food with the money, since starvation is a form of torture. It also doesn't work if I was going to pay rent with the money, since eviction is violent. Only relatively few escalation chains end in non-violent deprivation.

With fictitious legal entities it's more likely to end without harm to any natural entities. The last stages of the chain of enforcement against a corporation can be to transfer ownership to a different natural person, followed by dissolving it entirely. Both of those are just pushing words around on paper, and nobody gets a black eye. On the other hand, one could argue that dissolution is to a legal person what the death penalty is to a natural person, and we only just don't care as much legal people aren't real. I don't think have any ethical qualms with metaphorically murdering a corporation by writing a legal document saying it no longer exists, but it actually supports my point, that even against fictitious entities, escalation chains end with something analogous to shooting the corporation in the head.

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

#240

Post by [deleted] »

ben_w wrote: post #219
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 on…

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