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Discussion on: How does the web look if everyone owned their own data?

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ikirker profile image
Ian Kirker

Data sources must be treated as ephemeral. Social media entries live on servers that can be edited by the owner, so while they're safe from others, they can be edited by their owners and so aren't reliably static. Illegal data miners and archivers hoover up people's data to be fed to spam engines.

Most middle-class-and-up people have a mostly-always-on home hub that holds their data -- but since remote backups are impossible under this regime, sometimes people lose everything. (If you don't impose this, you end up with a cloud of data hubs which is halfway between this and now?)

Email, tax records, medical data, credit card receipts, location data; everything's on there, or for the more security conscious, secondary modules exist that can be better protected behind a home firewall (or in a fire-proof safe), or switched off when not needed. (Maybe the higher-quality ones offer more security, sturdier casing, and water-and-fire-proofing.)

Some authentication can be more secure and a little more like OAuth2 crossed with a current mobile OS permission request in appearance, since your device that stores the data can itself approve access to the data it holds.

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joshualjohnson profile image
Joshua Johnson

At the end of the day when you sign in through Facebook and they allow you to store your life on their servers. Do you really own that? It seems like you would be forced to go along with the rules they provide including the fact that you have to give them permission to mine your data.

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ikirker profile image
Ian Kirker

Please note that the post above is a statement of I think the world could be under the original poster's proposed situation. In this paradigm, I think Facebook would have to ship the ad engine to you, which would then mine your data on your machine and serve up the relevant ads.

Whether it would be allowed to download only the ads relevant to you or all current ads is another question, since those requests could then constitute personal data? I'm not sure.