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

238 pointsby IvanSologubover 4 years ago

27 comments

eivarvover 4 years ago
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.<p>I keep seeing data-hubs and identity-providers touting themselves as solutions to the web&#x27;s privacy issues, but I don&#x27;t see how they actually solve anything.<p>It seems like an attempted technical solution to a social problem to me.<p>The real problem with data based services (ads, Google search, etc) is really that a bunch of data is collected opaquely, unethically, and in some cases illegally. The whole system including data brokers and real time bidding is out of control.
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BlueTemplarover 4 years ago
&gt; “This technology could unlock an enormous amount of innovation,” potentially becoming a new platform as the iPhone was for smartphone apps, he said.<p>&quot;Platforms&quot;, aka &quot;Minitels 2.0&quot;¤ <i>are</i> what is wrong today with the Web specifically, and the state of today&#x27;s infocom technologies in general.<p>The whole <i>point</i> of Tim&#x27;s &quot;pods&quot;, is that just like the WWW, they aren&#x27;t going to be just another private, centralized platform. Or has this word diffused to the point of losing all meaning?<p>¤ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fdn.fr&#x2F;actions&#x2F;confs&#x2F;internet-libre-ou-minitel-2-0&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fdn.fr&#x2F;actions&#x2F;confs&#x2F;internet-libre-ou-minitel-2...</a> (fr)
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wombatmobileover 4 years ago
TBL and W3C could enable competition to de facto monopolies such as FB by providing web standards that enable competitors to overcome FB&#x27;s inherent walled garden first mover silo advantage.<p>How?<p>Extend HTML to include a Like button and a Share button, and implement a new standard that defines an open access comment platform.<p>I&#x27;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.
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coliveiraover 4 years ago
It is very interesting that, with the exception of people like Berners-Lee, computer scientists around the world have decided that the problems of social networks should be addressed only within the realm of private companies. I see little to no coordinated activity targeted at open social networks for commenting, liking, and sharing. Similar pattern on open and distributed protocols for searching and sharing data. It seems to me as a failure of academia in this important area of computing.<p>It is important to remember that distributed protocols for social interaction is not something new that researchers had not considered before. Email is the prime example of open, distributed protocol that still is very successful. But many researchers have stoped to consider such open protocols and jumped in the walled garden bandwagon.
chrisweeklyover 4 years ago
This is a bit of a tangent, but I think there&#x27;s a market for a &quot;self-tracker&quot; data hub of sorts. My half-baked idea is that it&#x27;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....
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QuadrupleAover 4 years ago
I like the goals of Solid, but tech-wise I fear it&#x27;s headed into the weeds. A detailed critique from a few days&#x27; deep dive into the tech stack: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.solidproject.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;constructive-criticism-from-an-experienced-developer&#x2F;3521" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.solidproject.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;constructive-criticism-from...</a>
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metabagelover 4 years ago
Bruce Schneier is involved with this project.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schneier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;inrupt_tim_bern.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schneier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;inrupt_tim_be...</a>
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pintxoover 4 years ago
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.
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wcerfgbaover 4 years ago
I&#x27;m glad TBL is working on this stuff, but at this point I can&#x27;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:<p>&gt; 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 better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.
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pents90over 4 years ago
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?
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wrnrover 4 years ago
Yesterday I got pissed when I tried to download a podcast episode. It is available on Apple, Google and Spotify, but these platforms won&#x27;t let you download a simple mp3.<p>Ended up having to pay for the network traffic.<p>Freedom is the better technology, and Solid claims to offer freedom but if you look closely it doesn&#x27;t.<p>In what world does a specification designed by comity, describing functionality that existed for at least 15 years, and that furiously lobbies the government for its forced adoption, have anything to do with freedom?<p>How does ActivePub help me compete with facebook, How? Why can TikTok get popular without it, Why?<p>Maybe, companies should be forced to offer me a RSS feed of mp3s. Maybe not mp3 but some open format, and we should force chip makers to add special instructions to their chips for optimal playing speed.
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mferover 4 years ago
We need apps built on this technology. It will go a long way to making it succeed and working out the nuances. Interesting tech is interesting. Something that&#x27;s generally useful or solves a normal problem... that&#x27;s something people will pick up.
cbdumasover 4 years ago
Something I rarely see brought up in these articles is the difficulty of defining &quot;data&quot; and who would own it. If I buy something on Amazon to be shipped to me from a third party seller, which part of that transaction is data that belongs to me? To Amazon? The the third party?<p>The article ventures a short list: &quot;websites visited, credit card purchases, workout routines, music streamed&quot;, but I don&#x27;t see how that could ever be turned into a coherent definition. A &quot;credit card purchase&quot; likely involves a dozen distinct parties with their own individual role and view of the event.
davidwsilvaover 4 years ago
The Solid Project uses OpenID authentication (which is built on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol). The claim is that Solid uses OpenID to uniquely identify every single shared object in a Pod. OpenID is then responsible for the access control to Pod&#x27;s resources. It is an interesting and intriguing enough of an idea which makes it worth investigating (even for curiosity-only purposes).
gnarbarianover 4 years ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;urbit.org&#x2F;understanding-urbit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;urbit.org&#x2F;understanding-urbit&#x2F;</a> is an attempt to solve this problem as well.
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Slackwiseover 4 years ago
I adore this project, and wish for it to succeed, but how do we incentivize or <i>force</i> companies to accommodate pods? Legislature? About the only way I can think of.
BlueTemplarover 4 years ago
&gt; “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?”<p>While I totally support Tim&#x27;s project, history will decide what is &quot;on the right side of history&quot;. Unless he&#x27;s from the future?
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oscargrouchover 4 years ago
Its a great project and it would solve a lot of problems we face today for sure. But i fear it will suffer with a problem of adoption.<p>People had to learn HTML and HTTP back in the day, because it was the thing that would turn possible to transfer information through the wire with a platform called browser.<p>It was the same with the Windows API, VB, Delphi or Android and the iPhone is today.<p>People will learn that thing not because it will &#x27;save the world&#x27;, sure some will, but for more pragmatic reasons. So you also have to offer those pragmatic reasons to people, because those reasons are also important after all.<p>I know TBL was more or less on the &quot;hippie&quot; side of the web standards and it was very important to the web&#x27;s core and foundation on the right track.<p>But i was not because of the HTML standard was great as a piece of technology, but the energy and the people that formed around it made it happen through the patient iteration over browsers, until browsers became a thing no one could avoid.<p>I&#x27;m saying this as somebody working more or less on the same problem, but who have taken a different approach..<p>The problem is hard because the state-of-the-art now is very sophisticated. You will have to compete with browsers and app platforms for mindshare, and i think you only can do it if you propose a new platform where people understand it as a better approach.<p>And i must say, the web alone as it is, is a broken foundation to lay out this sort of thing, for a lot of reasons.<p>So we need a new sort of browser, one that&#x27;s so different that you actually wont even be able to call it a browser anymore.<p>This is what i&#x27;m trying to do. Trying to solve the same sort of problems, but with a different take than Solid.<p>But i must say its pretty hard, because you also have to offer, at least as a starting point, what browsers and application platforms already offer to developer. Along with this, there&#x27;s a need for a incentive on the part of the user, the ultimate consumer of the thing. And this is also a hard problem, because you will need to offer something people want and dont have already..<p>I think i got this, but only time will tell. And even if the thing is somehow &quot;right&quot;, even than you might suffer from lack of adoption as the incentives might not be enough and that &#x27;killer app&#x27; that will make the platform boom never shows up.
kkylinover 4 years ago
Seems this may be pertinent to the discussion, even if it is relatively old:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dspace.mit.edu&#x2F;bitstream&#x2F;handle&#x2F;1721.1&#x2F;37600&#x2F;MIT-CSAIL-TR-2007-034.pdf?sequence=2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dspace.mit.edu&#x2F;bitstream&#x2F;handle&#x2F;1721.1&#x2F;37600&#x2F;MIT-CSA...</a>
hehehahaover 4 years ago
I want something a bit more extensive than this. I want something plug-and -play and portable where I can unplug my data in seconds and plug it back in when I want&#x2F;need to.
ngcc_hkover 4 years ago
Try it in china. Or all is just for non-china. And if you think you can’t do that this reveal most significant problem.
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MrManover 4 years ago
I had this idea in the early 90s that so much data was being and would in the future be collected about us, that citizens should be able to incorporate into abstract entities that served as their data proxies and to which commercial entities would attach their tracking. So Corp UUID xyz bought gas at an Amaco station, not Mr John Doe.<p>I gave up on this idea as the www form of internet arrived and e-commerce, adserve, cookies, and all other modern forms of surveillance capitalism flourished.<p>The idea that you can somehow control someone’s observation of your activities, and that you are entitled to privacy, or obscurity, or to be hidden, or forgotten, I realized ( or came to think ) was quixotic and antisocial.<p>It is a conflicted and torturous path to take, because Many real abuses occur and a lot of harm is done with data that is collected and analyzed.<p>I think a statutory right to partake in ownership of your data sounds sensible, but I think it too is unworkable and going in the wrong direction - to scarcity, fear, and the complement of fear is aggression.
WarOnPrivacyover 4 years ago
&gt; Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data<p>This seems like a movement that would be at odds with the interests of people who fund elections. It could easily trigger the bazillionth instance of corps and legislators uniting to squash a public interest.
sanquiover 4 years ago
My knee-jerk response to this headline is: again?<p>Paywall stops me from reading the actual article, so please let me know if it&#x27;s realistic this time.
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normanmatrixover 4 years ago
The GDPR could make or break this. Here&#x27;s hoping for the former..
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WarOnPrivacyover 4 years ago
I wish they guy behind this didn&#x27;t have &quot;Made Sure That DRM Was Baked Into The HTML5 Standard&quot; on his résumé.
breckover 4 years ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inrupt.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inrupt.com&#x2F;</a> Is the startup.<p>Unfortunately at the bottom is a copyright notice. Nothing is going to “put people in control of their personal data” as long as we have copyright. Otherwise lots of your “personal data” will remained locked up with corporations.
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