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Comment by thinkloop | Hacker News Reader

Instead of giving your contacts to facebook, why can't facebook instead operate directly on them in your personal data store? Why does youtube know which videos I've liked but I don't unless youtube allows me? Why is sharing my github repo something github has to do, and not me? Why are all my posts randomly dispersed and locked across multiple networks and not available for me to query and analyse as I see fit?

I hope eventually we all own and control our data while platforms are given limited access to it, rather than the other way around.

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I suppose the most simple explanation is that it's not profitable.

1. What kind of "operate on" wouldn't necessitate sending you contacts to them?

2. Because they're YouTube videos that you watched on YouTube and pressed the like button on YouTube. If you "like" them using a 3rd party client (I think NewPipe cam do this) then that information is saved locally

3. "Why is sharing my GITHUB repo something GITHUB has to do, and not me?" - see the problem now?

4. Because there are like 50 of us that would actually care to do that and there's no money in it for them. FWIW, doing that is actually possible these days with all the GDPR data export options, just a little tedious.

> If you "like" them using a 3rd party client (I think NewPipe can do this) then that information is saved locally.

Exactly. When you export your NewPipe data it creates a db file with all your searches, stream history, subscriptions and more. All of this happens without you having a YouTube account and this data doesn't leave the device until you decide.

> FWIW, doing that is actually possible these days with all the GDPR data export options, just a little tedious

It's tedious to the point that it is something else. The same reason the web is scrape-based rather than api-based today. When something is ancillary and done for compliance alone, you rarely get what you are looking for.

Say everyone had their own personal, live, accurate, predictable, actual data tree:

  facebook
    - friends
    - posts
  twitter
    - posts
    - followers
  email contacts
    - etc.

There would likely be an ecosystem of new services that create new value for you from that data. Combining things, extracting insights, backing things up, sharing things, organizing things, AI'ing things.

> 2. Because they're YouTube videos that you watched on YouTube and pressed the like button on YouTube.

Yes, that's how it is now, but it can be that going to youtube is granting them access to a branch of your tree on your server (which could be an encrypted managed 3rd-party).

> 3. "Why is sharing my GITHUB repo something GITHUB has to do, and not me?" - see the problem now?

As above, github the service can be made to operate on data that is yours in your warehouses.

> there's no money in it for them

They are still the app, they make the interconnections, they have tons of the valuable data and meta data.

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