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Comment by Yaina | Hacker News Reader

It's not easy to understand, especially from the blog post alone, but as far as I understand it, the proposition is the following: Big companies have the ability to do research on users all the time, either by doing anonymous studies or by tracking you for their ad networks.

This is a luxury many researchers that work outside of these big tech companies don't have, which creates a scientific power imbalance. Mozilla Rally is meant to give these capabilities to everyone, and the platform is meant to ensure that you always know what you sign up for and what data is being used.

If I understand the Princeton example correctly: They want to figure out how people consume and spread misinformation. Social networks like Facebook have all that data but won't share it. Now you can opt-in to a Rally study where independent researchers can examine the data.

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> This is a luxury many researchers that work outside of these big tech companies don't have, which creates a scientific power imbalance.

The power imbalance goes far beyond science. Independent research is foundational for platform accountability. An example: when I was working on the Senate staff, before I started teaching at Princeton, a recurring challenge was the lack of rigorous independent research on platform problems. We were mostly compelled to rely on anecdotes, which made oversight and building a factual record for legislation difficult.

I’m curious as to your take on independent scholarship, outside of the domain of academia?

Would appropriately rigorous independent scholarship be considered as a trustworthy source within your sphere?

> Would appropriately rigorous independent scholarship be considered as a trustworthy source within your sphere?

Definitely. Academia doesn't have a monopoly on excellent technology and society research. The Markup's data-driven investigative journalism, for example, is outstanding.

> Now you can opt-in to a a Rally study where independent researchers can examine the data.

It would have been great if they’d invested the resources to use Solid, here.

Thanks for mentioning this. Two questions:

1. In your experience, what is the maturity level of Solid?

2. Would you mind sketching out how you would do the integration with Solid? I'm reading over https://solidproject.org/users/get-a-pod but haven't spend a lot of brain cycles on it yet.

You’re welcome!

I’m in the same boat as you - haven’t spent many brain cycles on it yet.

Mozilla Rally would have been the perfect proof-of-concept for putting that idea to use and giving it a shakedown.

Generally, Solid seems to be pretty grounded in its attempt to resolve data sharing privacy concerns.

My understanding is that the implementations would be about the same as using browser storage.

I believe developers would need to approach data access from the perspective of “an infinitely sharded document database - shards are globally-uniquely identifiable - shards are remotely distributed - shards have their own IAM - for each shard, you must register as an authorized user and authenticate to access remote data”

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