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Comment by koevet | Hacker News Reader

As much as I like the idea (and the people behind it), I have an hard time seeing how this can succeed.

The idea of pod reminds me of the self-hosting movement: people -including myself - host a bunch of services to avoid sharing fundamental data, like email, GPS-history or contacts.

Still, "self-hosters" interact with all the big personal data hoarder out there (FB, Google, the many ad and tracking companies) which expose them to the same abuses as any other internet user.

Basically, I don't really see a company like FB play ball with these guys, for two reasons:

1) the privatization of data would be a existential threat to their business model

2) the majority of internet users are oblivious to the data collection tactics employed by half the internet and I can't picture folks raising pitchforks for "pods" to become a standard.

But I also hope to be dead wrong!

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≥ 2) the majority of internet users are oblivious to the data collection tactics employed by half the internet and I can't picture folks raising pitchforks for "pods" to become a standard.

Usually purely technical solutions to societal problems won't bring you far. It is still not bad to have them, because they essentially show what would be possible, if we just wanted. Helps in discussion as well if of all people Tim Berners-Lee was part of it.

However: we have issues of education around the topic and our jurisdictive let's the big internet corps get away with too much. Starting with taxes and privacy down to the societal effects their algorithms have.

What ad networks do is the digital equivalent of filming and spying on people who walk by your storefront. What they do, how they do it and the effects it has on society are wrong. Online Advertisement is probably one of the big drivers of the political division we are seeing lately, because controversial topics produce more engagement and more engagement is what people selling ads want.

If you'd explain the current practise to common folk, most of them clearly don't think is okay. This means both education and media isn't doing their job.

> What ad networks do is the digital equivalent of filming and spying on people who walk by your storefront.

Which is also legal, at least in the UK, and not many people have a problem with it. I think well-known, major abuses will need to occur before people take this seriously.

It is not legal in Germany and Austria at least. The UK is one of the most surveilled places in Europe.

Some of the new JCDecaux digital signage I've seen in Berlin definitely seems to have a camera lens on its top. There's no posted notice concerning video recording, but I wonder if it's just a lens with no camera, a camera but not attached to the rest of the device, or only disabled in software.

I've worked on JCDecaux smart signage. The camera is used for analytics purposes using computer vision (people counting, attentiveness, demographic data, dwell times, etc.). Nothing is recorded. In some cases, processing even happens at the edge.

> Nothing is recorded. In some cases, processing even happens at the edge.

If the data is not processed at the edge, how is nothing recorded? This smells like extremely minced words.

IANAL (definitely not a German one) but I'm almost certain that even post-2017 it's still illegal to take video in a public space and send it elsewhere, without a sign, even if that video is not in some sense "preserved" elsewhere.

If data stays in RAM and is not written to permanent storage, I think you can reasonably say it’s not recorded.

Frankly, I think you could even persist it to disk as long as it was pruned within 24 hours and reasonably say it’s not recorded.

Otherwise I’m not sure how you can argue ANY data is “unrecorded”. Writing to a hardware buffer in the camera module would seem like “recording” to me by the strict standard.

If I go and record a stranger in the street today in Germany I am quite certain that would be illegal even if I delete the recording within 24h.

And I studied Film in Germany and had to deal with precisely this a hundred times. If WallDecaux is doing this, it is at least a legal grey area, unless they operate on private property, look at their own private property and have a sign that says there is a camera in operation.

Ah yes, the "NES ROM" theory of public surveillance laws. Definitely well-considered.

Another theory that could place it in a loophole: It may be performing object detection without recording what we think of as normal video. Similar to self-driving technology and object recognition, useful data can be derived without actually recording the traditional thought of “HD video in color”.

> What ad networks do is the digital equivalent of filming and spying on people who walk by your storefront. What they do, how they do it and the effects it has on society are wrong.

wait a minute. i know there are currently startups that offer this exact type of analytics. and from what i know these types of analytics are extremely beneficial to both consumers and store owners. what exactly is the problem here?

> extremely beneficial to both consumers

What "extreme benefits" do I derive from being filmed and analyzed by stores I happen to walk past?

you get better products. the store gets better sales. it's a win win all around.

this is already happening and it's already providing value.

How do you get better products?

What does a filmed image give you that isn't reflected by sales numbers?

The goal of tracking isn't to make and sell better products, the goal is to create an environment in which the product you already got gets sold more. So essientially people who track you want to manipulate you into buying shit you don't need at prices you wouldn't pay unless manipulated.

Tracking people who would buy your product anyways isn't all that interesting: you've already got them.

If analytics are beneficial to customers, why aren't they opt-in but instead businesses try hard not to let them even opt out?

The value for the customer comes when they not opt in.

this question makes no sense.

since on street analytics are already beneficial to everyone, consumers and providers, why should they be opt-in? they should be, and currently are, automatic opt-in with an option to opt-out. you are walking on the street, so any privacy is gone just from walking outside of your home.

What doesn't make sense is to consider never leaving the house a realistic option. Nor does the phrase "automatic opt-in".

And I hope this:

> since on street analytics are already beneficial to everyone, consumers and providers, why should they be opt-in?

is a joke. It's pure authoritarianism.

My best guess if it does succeed it will be in the public sector or highly regulated industries, probably in the EU and not the "consumer web" as we know it.

Things like bank account information (PSD2), health care records, smart energy meters.

It just needs to be there and be good enough, so when the time comes and people are upset enough for whatever reason, regulators can instruct FAANG to use it.

Usage meanwhile by non-US public sector, corporations (worried about industrial espionage), ethical consumers, could be enough to get it to that sate.

Regarding 1):

What I was told by the Polypoly.eu guys is that they were pushing for and helping with the policy making that led to the GDPR. They said that once it gets weaponized, using e.g. ML, it becomes /very/ effective at protecting an individual's privacy.

Think seeing some picture of yourself drunk at a stag night in a strip club on FB and marking it for being moved to your private pod (for memory's sake) or deleted (because you hold a leadership position and the picture doesn't resonate 'enough' with your carefully crafted social archetype).

Now the pod software will ask FB to remove the picture with a timeframe X in compliance with GDPR. Including each and every copy of the content they hold. All this happens automatically.

This also triggers a process that checks if the data has disappeared from the public after timeframe X has passed.

If not, the whole thing gets added to a class action lawsuit bundle by an AI. This also happens automatically.

When the lawsuit reaches critical mass, it gets filed in Brussels. Automatically.

Regarding 2): This is indeed a big problem still. But even more so is why people use e.g. FB in the first place.

I think it will require some sort of services running atop the the pod infrastructure to make up for the loss of convenience the disappearance of certain data from platforms like FB has on end users.

And I see a missing piece here, at the end, in the approaches of Inrupt/Polypoly.

Facebook is not the social network but an advertising company. Their product is not the data but ads.

1) They will play ball because they can incorporate the pod data into their advertising platform. They may even start hosting pods for the people who trust them. Pods allow them to sell advertisement for all the people who refuse to create facebook accounts.

2) People will instantly care once you can sell your data and make money. Facebook and other advertising companies will pay for the data. Insurance companies will reduce fees for people who have pods.

The last bit is what has me most concerned, services getting more expensive because everyone is expected to subsidize with their data. I guess then it’ll just be time to build something that drips realistic data about me to the pod.

I wouldn't necessarily equate "distributed data ownership" with privatization of data, but more to the ability for more people to leverage said data more in their favor as apposed to what the digital overlords like FB et al. just allow people to do on their platforms (and their platforms only).

I think as long a some internet users at the margins get exposed to the downsides of the asymmetrical relationship they have with bulk data collection mostly benefiting the few (and have the ability to subvert it to any degree) the digital overlords are facing a death by 1000 cuts rather than the swift blow everyone seems to expect.

Will Inrupt be the thing that brings the digital overlords to their knees? Probably not, that will be best achieved by the digital overloads themselves overtime by creating the conditions for people to even want to pursue and allocate resources for ideas (like those that Inrupt invokes in some) in the first place.

One way Inrupt approach could work is through Trans-national regulations (e.g. EU).

I still believe that a major change in the way data collection tactics are carried out should come from "below" (the people) rather than some incompetent digitally-challenged politician.

Practically, if all the technical challenges of Inrupt are sorted out - and I see many - this could become a standard enforced by "enlightened" governments.

This would probably take a lot of lobbying and can only work if

>I still believe that a major change in the way data collection tactics are carried out should come from "below" (the people) rather than some incompetent digitally-challenged politician.

This is the only way as far as i'm concerned, if something is to be long lasting. People have to be living it in practice because of the inherit cost/benefits of system over another, no matter what any particular government makes a diktat for. Right now, most people are cost/benefits skewed towards the fb's (but that is slowly changing to me beacause the cost of computing continues to decline, while the knowledge of such increases at the same time as people at the margins experience higher perceived costs with the fb's).

>This would probably take a lot of lobbying and can only work if

Thats still playing the game of the giants… why play that game if trying to something new? Probably there are cheaper ways to subvert it, while making the giants pay increasing lobbying costs for ends that chip away at their power.

> This would probably take a lot of lobbying and can only work if

Assassinated mid-comment by rival lobby. RIP koevet, we hardly knew ye.

> 1) the privatization of data would be a existential threat to their business model

> 2) the majority of internet users are oblivious to the data collection tactics employed by half the internet and I can't picture folks raising pitchforks for "pods" to become a standard.

Both of your points are spot on.

Since #1 would only change if forced, I believe it would need to start with #2 ... which I think requires a _permanent_ social change in the perception of companies that behave like FB... Something even more potent than their recent political meddlings, something so incompatible with western political ideologies and human rights that such companies become pliable and change their business model merely to survive.

I'm not sure what the instigator for such a change is yet, but it will need to make everyone very upset...

> the majority of internet users are oblivious to the data collection tactics employed by half the internet

I agree with this, but it's even worse: the majority of the remaining internet users who do have a clue about data collection, either don't care, or accept it as inevitable.

Yep, I have dabbled in self hosting and have a systems running at home for decades. Unfortunately self-hosters also have to be their own blue team, doing own vulnerability management, patching testing and it's relentless.

I don't think it's an existential threat to FAANG. Because they could request access to your data to perform their AI/analytics on it to then be able to deliver you value-added personalized services.

Most likely these sort of brokered accesses will be the purview of third-party data brokers who will handle your pods for you.

Why would people accept their data to be harvested? I guess money could be an incentive, which is quite interesting because it would fundamentally revert the power dynamics between the big data abuser and the people.

Lots of food for thought.

>Why would people accept their data to be harvested?

Same as always, to get services free of charge. If I want my photos to be searchable, I'm going to have to let someone run their AI on them.

As an iPhone user, I have my photos in iCloud. I'm paying for it through high device prices and storage fees.

But as Apple's business model is to sell expensive devices, they won't let me securely share my photos with my wife who doesn't own any Apple devices.

So I also upload all my photos to Google Photos where I'm benefitting from a far better AI as well.

If my photos were stored in a Solid pod, I could grant access to various service providers who use various different business models, but it would be far more flexible and easier to switch.

That's what I'm hoping for. Not sure if it will ever come to pass, but it's worth a try.

> If I want my photos to be searchable, I'm going to have to let someone run their AI on them.

In the next month or so, that won't be true anymore if you use PhotoStructure to host your photos and videos. Disclaimer: I'm the author.

PhotoStructure is software you run, on hardware you own. It runs on desktops, docker, or headless servers, like your NAS. Your library is stored in a cross-platform, open format, so you're free to change how you host your library. I'm still enrolling beta users to try it for free in exchange for their feedback. Later this year, rather than being ad-supported, a subscription will enable advanced features (like automatic tagging based on image content).

(and as the Solid framework becomes more useable, I'll definitely try to support it).

To add another item to your list, when you're in Apple News and maybe you're reading a free online publication like The Hill, there's no obvious access to Safari, and when you try to share the link it's an Apple News link. There used to be an easy way to get to Safari until recently.

Come on Apple.

The way I do it is to share with Safari from Apple News and then share with Email from Safari. Yes it's ridiculous.

Also, regardless of any privacy settings, Apple News keeps showing me Amazon ads for stuff I bought on Amazon. It drains my battery as well.

So I'm not really keen on using it anyway.

But what if pods are inherently "closed" as you imagine, but a company would actually have to pay a fee to access some of the data and run whatever algo they want.

Would this create a society where low income persons would be perennially targeted by intrusive ads?

That society doesn't need to be created because it already exists. What Solid would do is give all of us a bit more flexibility to set our own priorities than we have now.

People on low incomes will always have fewer options and less flexibility. If we want to change that, we must change income inequality. No technology or business model will ever change that.

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