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Comment by atrus | Hacker News Reader

It is/was supposed to be a centralized store of your data, so that you can have more control over who has it. Instead of uploading a photo to facebook, you upload it to your pod, then allow facebook access to it to post to your timeline. Then you can see who has access to your stuff and revoke if wanted.

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What incentive does Facebook have to support something like that? Zero.

Yeah, that's kinda the issue. Even if pods came first, Facebook has the incentive to give pod storage for free. It's a nice idea, just don't see it taking off.

I also don't see how it's possible to revoke access to your information; once they're given access, there's nothing stopping them from backing up all of your information in their own storage.

Another scenario is going to a doctors appointment and having to fill out forms with your info (name, address, preferences, medical history and etc)

with a system like this, you can tap into a sign in station and give them access.

Doctors can also send you any documents they generate and it gets stored in your POD.

oh boy the HIPAA compliance nightmare this will create. Sadly there is a reason why every doctor office you go to give you poorly xeroxed form and a pencil to fill it out. Wish that would change obviously.

Not for the folks north of you. I'd be happy with a form & a pencil but for the past year plus I've been told by the less than helpful dr office assistant to "Go to our website and make your appointment" which then makes me fill in various screening forms.

The trade off - clerk doesn't have to spend less than a minute looking up and giving me a time for my next appointment and I have to setup yet another id & password to use their crappy appointment/medical forms app in a cloud somewhere.

Assuming you have a universal API for all medical forms ever. This would be like the final boss of scope-creep APIs

Centralized platforms have no incentive to implement this

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