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Comment by starfallg | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the direction that application design is moving towards right now with centralisation of user information into data storage in the cloud, this will only get worse. Just needs a small exploitable vector exposed (whether human or machine) to result in another mass data leak.

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My prophesy is that someday we'll wake up, some day in the near future, to news of a massive breach of Gmail data, and it will be the death knell for keeping personal data "in the cloud." What we are doing as an industry now, by encouraging that, is irresponsible.

The antidote is to pretend everything you say to a computer is public record.

That’s not reasonable, of course, but having it in mind changes your behavior.

The problem with this is that socializing moved to be digital, especially with COVID-19.

Pseudonyms help a little bit, but it's still easy for an attacker to know who you really are.

The mass usage of pseudonyms has the drawback of facilitating the spread of 'bad' information in such a model though. The web-of-trust breaks down with the prevalence of pseudonymous throwaway accounts (which can also be farmed, like on Reddit).

This isn't feasible, not even remotely. I work from home, do I just stop doing my job? Because I cannot possibly work under such an assumption, at all. I can pretend to, but there is way enough that I must communicate that really should not become public. A lot of other people are in the same boat I guess, especially these days.

Also, not sending anything remotely personal through my phone would make it very, very hard to keep in touch with friends and family. I can't travel to see all of them all the time, and Covid makes meeting the local ones really difficult, too.

I don't think it's constructive to cast huge societal issues as individual failings, with remedies that are absurdly impractical. That only helps to perpetuate the problem.

I think you're really over-estimating how much of what you say would be bad if it were public record, to be honest.

Also the fact that if literally everything everyone said on a computer was public record it'd be so noisy and such a mess nobody would bother looking at what random average people are saying.

And hopefully a mass exodus, as decentralized alternatives start to become more viable :)

I'll stick with my $5 thumbdrive.

That works until you lose your keychain :/

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