I like the goals of Solid, but tech-wise I fear it's headed into the weeds. A detailed critique from a few days' deep dive into the tech stack: https://forum.solidproject.org/t/constructive-criticism-from...
Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data
41–50 of 94 posts
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data
#42This is a bit of a tangent, but I think there's a market for a "self-tracker" data hub of sorts. My half-baked idea is that it'd run locally and ingest my activity of all sorts -- privately, securely, individually -- to help inform my personal knowledge base. Along the lines of Readwise but broader and deeper, and with analytics....
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data
#43How do you grant a company access to your data but prevent them from storing it? And how does it apply to data a company generates about me? For example, if I listen to songs on Spotify, are they supposed to somehow not store it, but still give me recommendations?
If you are asking how it would be technically feasible, there are essentially two ways at the top of my head.
1. End to end encryption. They store your data, but without your password, its encrypted in the db and useless.
2. You pass all your data in every request, like a sqlite file or something.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data
#44TBL and W3C could enable competition to de facto monopolies such as FB by providing web standards that enable competitors to overcome FB's inherent walled garden first mover silo advantage.
How?
Extend HTML to include a Like button and a Share button, and implement a new standard that defines an open access comment platform.
I'm not suggesting W3C should set up servers to compete with service providers. Rather, it could define protocols for those capabilities as web standards which are designed to enable arbitrary 3rd party implementers to federate interactions. That way, service providers could attract niche social groups, whilst pooling interactions, thereby overcoming the dilemma of all being too small to compete with FB.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data
#45> “No one will argue with the direction,” said Liam Broza, a founder of LifeScope, an open-source data project. “He’s on the right side of history. But is what he’s doing really going to work?” While I totally support Tim's project, history will decide what is "on the right side of history". Unless he's from the future?
Well.. obviously it's speculation. Specifically a form of speculation describing Liam's belief in this technology. With that said, depending on what specifically Liam had in mind with that quote, i don't think it's far off. Tim's technological choice might be right or wrong, but it's difficult to argue that people should be able to own more of their data than they do now. Is there some pro-Google argument that would…
I guess as long as it isn't a form of "we are the good guys = we cannot lose (at least in the long term)"…
I guess that I found the whiplash with the next phrase somewhat funny.
As far as for Google, they're certainly very competent at their job of gathering (and using) the world's information. Which makes them both tempting to use, and also extremely dangerous. Also, remember their old motto ? I wonder how many of today's googlers still believe that they're the "good guys" ?
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data
#46TBL and W3C could enable competition to de facto monopolies such as FB by providing web standards that enable competitors to overcome FB's inherent walled garden first mover silo advantage. How? Extend HTML to include a Like button and a Share button, and implement a new standard that defines an open access comment platform. I'm not suggesting W3C should set up servers to compete with service providers. Rather, it co…
I believe ActivityPub does allow for "Like button"-like functionality: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#liked
And, ActivityPub is already a W3C published standard...Of course, having an existing standard doesn't mean that the Facebooks's of the world will choose to adopt it.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data
#47I'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…
@wcerfgba That is such a great quote about unix and an existing codebase being good enough! Do you know the source? I'd love to refer to that in my presentations at work, etc. Thanks!
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data
#48How do you grant a company access to your data but prevent them from storing it? And how does it apply to data a company generates about me? For example, if I listen to songs on Spotify, are they supposed to somehow not store it, but still give me recommendations?
I think the privacy angle is misguided. Most people don't really care about it. Even moreso for stuff like what songs did I listen to on Spotify.
The better angle is that we're becoming digital serfs. Google decided that they didn't want Google Music to exist anymore and poof went my listening history and playlists. Any service that I use today can do the same thing. If that data were stored somewhere I had access to I could have imported it in to Spotify.
This is an area I think Amazon or CloudFlare could step into. Sell consumers a NAS type box that keeps their data local. Sell companies on Lambda/Workers @ Home and have their applications run on that NAS.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data
#49This is a bit of a tangent, but I think there's a market for a "self-tracker" data hub of sorts. My half-baked idea is that it'd run locally and ingest my activity of all sorts -- privately, securely, individually -- to help inform my personal knowledge base. Along the lines of Readwise but broader and deeper, and with analytics....
1000% yes. Local logging of activities from lots of applications and devices. Everything gets added to a full-text search index, and the data only lives locally unless otherwise specified.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data
#50Interesting 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.
Depends on what the data is and if the aggregators can understand it.
You could have the model where the silo produces encrypted blobs and the end client can read it. (What's stored and connected is nothing but encrypted blobs)