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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

Well, I guess my question to you is, what would this thing do without Google?

If you ask it for directions, are you going to build your own mapping engine or just use google maps or another third party solution?

If you ask for the latest basketball news, are you going to search google or are you going to build your own web crawler?

If you ask it to play your favourite song, where will it play the music from? A local hard disk? A service like spotify, apple music, or youtube?

Without Google (or Amazon, if it's the echo), you don't really have much except a voice-to-text box if you want to exclude their services.

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Directions can be done offline just fine using openstreetmap data and a library like graphhopper. Music could and should be locally stored. And yes, the news has to come from a server, but this could be done anonymously instead of with the full range of google tracking.

I'm starting to get really annoyed at the tendency to put everything online when it doesn't need to be. Online-integrated devices are brittle and have a built-in expiration date. We should prefer devices for which online integration, if it exists at all, is optional and easily replaced by your own server.

>We should prefer devices for which online integration, if it exists at all, is optional and easily replaced by your own server.

This is something that's only going to be important to the tech-savvy. Your typical consumer wants idiot-proof instant gratification, and cloud-powered apps and devices provide that.

Privacy is not something only cherished by the tech savvy. The problem is, there is a lack of openness about the deal being engaged in when using these services. Consumers do not know what is being done with their data or even that it is being collected. That may be obvious to us, as engineers who understand it, but it isn't to your every day user. They are not stupid. It's just that our industry is not transparent and to be honest pretty damn deceptive in how customers are engaged.

We really need a ratings agency for IoT devices that gives them a score based upon how much they leak data.

I would argue that you cannot make a cloud-powered device idiot-proof. Inevitably the network will hiccup and you will have to be tech-savvy to fix it.

I predict a consumer backlash against smart devices once people realize just how dumb they become without the cloud.

True, right up until the internet stops working in which case they really will be idiots for not having better, read smarter, infrastructure. I, for one, want google as far from me as is possible.

> Music could and should be locally stored.

With Spotify and YouTube, I access dozens of new songs every day, songs I have never heard before. Would I have to purchase each of these songs, download them, and put them on the device in advance?

There's nothing wrong with subscribing to a music service, as long as the music doesn't stop when the network does. That's why I say music should be stored locally, even if just in a cache.

Now you need a pretty beefy server in your home to have all of that data, and be able to return results relatively quickly. The music could be an integrated NAS device though.

All of that said, most home users aren't going to want to setup a home server with a database in order to get directions.

It's not so dire. OSMAnd discards data it doesn't use and has worldwide coverage in about 25 gigabytes. That data needs to grow a lot to have better coverage for stuff like POIs, but 100 or 200 gigabytes is going to go a long way.

On my phone with 1 gigabyte of memory, it can calculate a several hundred mile route in a few seconds. That's not as cool as the instant routes you get from real actual beefy servers, but it isn't unusable.

With just a little complexity you could do local routes on device and call out to a server for longer routes. That dramatically lowers the data requirement and tightens up the calculation times.

Well, you could still use Google services. I think the largest concern is over the active microphone. If you specifically request something that is different.

Also it would be nice to have control and choice over which services you use. Maybe Google or Amazon everything isn't the right choice. There's OpenStreetMap, DuckDuckGo, downloaded music... Google is very useful but it is far from the only resource out there. Thinking so would be delusional.

> If you ask it for directions, are you going to build your own mapping engine or just use google maps or another third party solution?

(In the following, "server" means computer owned by an outside entity, such as Google or Amazon, and "local" means on a computer owned by you, even if that computer of yours is acting as a server for your other devices)

It doesn't have to be all or nothing.

The maximum privacy leaking method would be to have every direction query handled entirely on the server end, which means you are telling the server the source and destination of every trip you ask directions for.

The maximum practical privacy preserving method would be to download map data for a wide geographical region, and then do all direction calculations locally.

A middle ground would be that when you ask for directions, download map data from the server for the city or county regions necessary for that trip, and do the directions calculations locally, and save the downloaded map data. For subsequent trips, use the saved data, occasionally checking with the server to see if there are updates. Someone snooping at the server will know the first time you ask for directions involving a given city or county, but won't find out where specifically you are going. Depending on how the update checks work, they may also subsequently get an idea of when you make other trips in that area, but again will not get specific origin and destination.

> If you ask for the latest basketball news, are you going to search google or are you going to build your own web crawler?

A couple possibilities to do this.

One is to pull a comprehensive news feed from the server, and then locally filter and sort it.

Another is to use Google to search for sources of basketball news, and then subsequently you get your basketball news directly from those sites.

That's a good question.

One answer is that in each of those cases there are alternative mapping/news/music services. An open-source, privacy-first device could be an intermediary that wraps other services, and if it got significant adoption, serve as a incentive for those services to compete on quality/price/privacy-awareness.

There are even startups, like ours (Diffbot) that are building general purpose knowledge graphs for developers to use.

"""Search is cool, but Google-style universal search might be a bit overrated. Google still relies on institutions to provide data in indexable form, and those institutions build their reputations in ways that only partially rely on Google traffic.""" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729467)

Precisely this.

There is NO open source alternative to Google.

Electricity and equipment to run it will never be free, so there will never by an open source Google.

The same could be said about Wikipedia. If we all chip in (code, governance and money), we can make it happen. I am part of two coops and one LLC that back FOSS projects. I even make a living out of it.

There may be data issues (Google can easily buy datasets), software issues (good algorithms and fighting spam) and probably many other issues. Many people probably do not feel enough incentive to re-create Google. It works well enough and is not irritating enough.

Then again, search and maps/directions are pretty much the only services I use. For mapping projects that do not require directions, I use OSM-based solutions. For email I use a home-hosted Zimbra VM, for chat I use Mattermost and IRC, for news I use a few websites (most aggregators suck and just become echo-bubbles). etc.

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