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

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 94 posts

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

#71

Post by cxr »

sfink wrote: post #61
QuadrupleA wrote: post #41

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...

tl;dr: Solid is exposing a database of data with a filesystem API. This will not end well.

That's not exactly true. Solid is a refinement of HTTP, and HTTP is and always has been closer to "messages and ports" than files. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17897325> (Not a critique of whether your tldr is an accurate summary of the forum post or not, just that the criticism itself doesn't hold.) Having said that, moving to the imperfect abstraction of a dumb filesystem alone would be beneficial (better than what we're doing now, at least), even if that's all it ever amounted to, and we were stuck with that bad abstraction forever.

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

#72

Post by cxr »

westurner wrote: post #30
eivarv wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

Laws still exist against things like perjury, even though the existence of the law is not a technical means in itself able to prevent perjury. Note that one of the comments upthread specifically mentioned legislation. The current notion that many people in the tech world have, which roughly states that what determines whether something is kosher is whether it's technically possible to accomplish, is something that needs to change, instead of things just staying a permanent Wild West forever.

There's also an old phrase that putting locks on your doors doesn't actually stop a determined attacker, but that it's okay because they're not meant to—that they're meant to "keep honest people honest". It's a principle that applies here.

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

#73

Post by cxr »

treis wrote: post #48
pents90 wrote: post #3

How 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…

People do care about privacy, it's just that they have Snapchat-style privacy concerns, not the hypothetical ones that technologists tend to talk too much about. You're right that people don't care about YouTube having access to their stuff; they care about people having it—people like Regina, or their manager (or Regina, their manager). The whole "digital serfdom" concept is as abstract of a concern (and in the minds of many, as irrelevant) as the classic surveillance capitalism arguments that you're putting down, even if the digital serfdom concept is accurate. People just don't care about anything that isn't an immediate concern.

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

#74

Post by etrabroline »

swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #64
wrnr wrote: post #59

Yesterday I got pissed when I tried to download a podcast episode. It is available on Apple, Google and Spotify, but these platforms won't let you download a simple mp3. Ended up having to pay for the network traffic. Freedom is the better technology, and Solid claims to offer freedom but if you look closely it doesn't. In what world does a specification designed by comity, describing functionality that existed for a…

I run a podcast, and built my own distribution to spotify, itunes, etc. Those platforms just consume an rss feed and the mp3s are hosted on my s3 bucket Here's what the rss feeds look like Https://codechefs.dev/rss.xml If you do some google searches on "podcast name rss" I'm sure a public feed will pop up But yeah I'm not sure why these platforms don't let you see the rss feeds though

>platforms

The answer to your question is embedded within it. Apple Spotify and Google don't want you to leave their control.

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

#75

Post by etrabroline »

monksy wrote: post #55
normanmatrix wrote: post #39

The GDPR could make or break this. Here's hoping for the former..

I don't see how GDPR would break this. It would be compatible with what that hopes to acomplish. This is a technology solution which helps you to enforce GDPR redactions.

"Former" means the first thing, which was "make". He's saying he hopes GDPR helps adoption.

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

#76

Post by alisonkisk »

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.

Who is marketing it as "solving privacy"?

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

#77

Post by alisonkisk »

cxr wrote: post #70
chrisweekly wrote: post #42

This 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....

Check out Brad Fitzpatrick's Perkeep/Camlistore.

Does it have analytics tools or pluggable apps?

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

#78

Post by mxuribe »

Slackwise wrote: post #60
mxuribe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@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!

Parent mentioned it was "esr" or Eric S. Raymond.

I guess I read too quickly, and my eyes glanced right over that. Thanks!!

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

#80

Post by alisonkisk »

pintxo wrote: post #26

We should simply outlaw most privacy-invasive behavior. People will still demand news, social-media etc, but the payment will be different. Technology cannot and must not solve everything.

Define "privacy-invasive" in a way everyone agrees.
Post reply on HN