Ask HN: Is collecting your data cool if it is available to everyone? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is collecting your data cool if it is available to everyone?

1 pointklhugo3 comments

Thought experiment.

Let's assume that a number of services only work well/are viable when the app collects a lot of information from its users.

What if we make all app's collected data available publicly in a database - with user identity anonymized.

This would make me a lot more comfortable to use the service. I would have less of that feeling "they are profiting over me". And it would incite competition since all companies would have access to the data as well. Something like open banking [1], but for user data.

The challenge is to ensure the data is published in a format where you can not trace back to the users, while still allowing ML apps to use it [2].

I'm curious to hear community thoughts on this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy

Allowing cutomers and soiety at large to benefit from such data pools is obviously better than not doing so. The specific cases' details would be required to judge whether a particular collection is worthy or not.

Say racial or sexual preference DBs... good data right? really? long debate to be had there. How about something like Erowid's trip reports [1] but for all prescription medications? Lots easier to see value in that but what about those who interpret the data wrong? Apparently thats reason enough for censorship now.

look into the arguments about the privacy implications of phone books. IIRC there were court cases about the phone company charging extra for "unlisted" numbers.

[1] https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp_front.shtml

In the 1990s Erowid had trip reports from people who had halfway decent judgement. Today I don’t know it has been infiltrated by anti-drug crusaders or if it is really that hard to figure out that if you take a fistful of downers out of a bag you should leave the bag at home. (E.g. otherwise you find the cops go from being concerned about you to kicking you when the bag slips out of your pocket.)

Was it really that trustworthy then? How many of the flash fad "research chemicals" got reports because there was a 50kg minimum from a supplier and somebody had a bunch they needed to sell?

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