Comment by he_is_legend | Hacker News Reader

Comment by he_is_legend | Hacker News Reader

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Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me - so i put various bits of my preferences and identity data into a personal data silo, and use that data silo to connect to various web services. Next thing you know each service will add a set of permissions which they can request and you can allow or deny and thus "keep you safe", until after a while every service starts asking for more and more permissions and more and more of your personal data. And they've already got you locked in by storing all your emails or photos or whatever, so you agree and they just get all your data. And nothing was solved.

The answer to walled-garden internet institutions isn't amalgamating all your personal data into one database so the walled-garden vendors can more easily grab that data. It's decentralisation and diversity (as in more choice) of vendor. Once again a Silicon Valley / venture capitalist darling fails to understand what data privacy means, and just bundle up their latest data grab in a shiny marketing package.

Go further: services will offer features in exchange for more data. Your worth could be tied to how private you are with your data... ie. more data hoarding = more valuable target. This creates an incentive structure for users to hoard their data, only selling it to their most important services, and services themselves will attempt to create features that make providing that data worth it.

The reason people blindly say ok to every permission popup is because there's no incentive to say no. So yeah, your concern makes sense now but it might not in a "web5" world. I can guarantee any app saying "please give us all your data to use this" would get btfo'd very quickly in a world where people can use their data as leverage.

Technology influences behavior and mindset, and I think this particular idea might be a good influence. It's certainly better than what we have now where every service simply takes all your data or buys it from other companies.

My primary concern is data integrity; is storing the data on the global network good enough to disincentivize apps from scraping local user data with their own tools? What would stop an app from using the protocol and also maintaining its own database? Is that actually part of the deal? For example: Bring data from other apps to this one, and you can access a set of features. This app will now mine new data to put back into the network?

This is one of the things I was wondering about. How is it enforced that whichever third party app I want to connect to must store data (in some standardized format) on my personal DWN?

Agree with your sentiment. If we don’t change the underlying incentive structure nothing will change.

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