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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you.

I don't see how this follows. The moment you create/share data with a site, what's to prevent them from reselling it?

The only thing this seems to attempt to solve is portability/interop (and moving control of and responsibility for blocking/moderation/spam to users rather than sites).

I don't see how it helps at all with privacy or you "controlling" who gets your data. If you give it to site A but not data collector B, what's preventing A from selling it to B? As far as I can tell, the situation will remain identical to how it is today.

Your data will never be in one place unless you never share it. The moment you use it with other sites or services, it is stored there too, out of your control.

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Nothing is preventing it, but 3rd party operates on a copy. You are still owner of the data and it is on one place which makes it easier for you to access it, share it, backup it, analyze it. So, this doesn't prevent reselling in general but prevents data locking. From there, I guess its not that hard to demonstrate which 3rd party sold your data and sue them. It also mandates nonproprietary data formats.

All that is much, much better than what we have now.

> From there, I guess its not that hard to demonstrate which 3rd party sold your data and sue them.

But it doesn't? Obviously every site's TOS will say that by providing them with your data they can use it for all sorts of purposes. If you sued, you'd lose.

And you're generally going to want to make your data available to the various services requesting it, because otherwise most people won't see your posts and comments on their preferred platform.

Your site, the source of the data, could also include a TOS. Plenty of working examples in the commercial world where licensees are allowed to use data but not compile or resell it.

So I actually started researching this, and it turns out that, by the principles in Field v. Google Inc. (2006), neither side would have an enforceable TOS, but that a user making their social data available on their host and not attempting to block any particular crawlers with robots.txt would create an implied license that would allow social media sites to store and display the posts. Which is what allows Google to display information, snippets, and images from sites it crawls.

Facebook couldn't enforce a TOS because the hosting user had never gone to facebook.com and created an account, so the user never agreed to a contract. But a user couldn't enforce a TOS either because the crawling was automated, so Facebook wouldn't be agreeing to a contract either. But Facebook would be allowed to use the data because that's what a user is inviting by making it publicly available to crawlers and not doing anything to restrict access to Facebook.

"Control" here means that there are people who write blogpost worthy comments or messages on Facebook or other Meta properties. That's the only place where they exist.

When Meta (or any other company) decides to destroy them, they go away forever. You have no "control" over it.

https://indieweb.org/POSSE is the way to go.

You want to write a long post on a 3rd party platform? Write it on your own device, that you control. Then you save it, copy the content and post wherever you like.

If your 3rd party blogging or social media platform goes tits up and everything disppears, you still have your own copy you can just Ctrl-C Ctrl-V anywhere.

You can go as fancy with this as you like, depending on your nerd-level. You can have a self-hosted N8N system that automatically reposts everything to new sites you add to the flow. Or you can just have your stuff in a directory in Obsidian.

> The moment you create/share data with a site, what's to prevent them from reselling it?

If I can clearly assert origin and personal ownership of my data, I can forbid further reselling of it.

EU legislation shows that we can actually have the right to demand that a company forgets about us. Asserting such rights become easier the more accurately we define what data is ours.

> If I can clearly assert origin and personal ownership of my data, I can forbid further reselling of it.

Can you? A site's TOS will say that by sharing your data, you grant them the right to display, reuse and redistribute it, the same as you do now. And that would take precedence because your host provided the data. They requested and you provided.

The only thing that would change that is actual legislation. But then the legislation is orthogonal to personal data storage. If you want legislation for that, pursue legislation for that. Personal data storage is completely separate, and the two shouldn't be confused with each other.

The right granted by the TOS elapses when you cancel the respective service, or when you revoke your consent (in which case the service provider may possibly cancel the service). (Some TOS are also simply illegal to begin with.) That’s what the GP is referring to.

No they don't. I don't know where you've gotten that information, but none of it is correct.

I mean, a TOS could be written that way. But they're generally not, because companies don't want to self-impose limits like that.

The TOS usually has something like "grant the platform a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to host, display, distribute, modify, and otherwise use that content in connection with the service".

See the word "perpetual"? That's standard.

A TOS cannot override https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/.

And the GDPR doesn't apply outside the EU.

It sounded to me like you were making a general statement about TOS's.

current data points are much more valuable than historical data points, so storing old data doesn't have much incentives

also by having ability to enable/disable access to your data, you have the power of who gets what and for which purpose

also reselling of your data should become illegal to start with, would you be OKAY if your lawyer sells your data? or your colorectal surgeon? off course not, we have laws in place for that, and same laws should be applied to whoever handles your personal data

> current data points are much more valuable than historical data points, so storing old data doesn't have much incentives

Not true -- advertising profiles are vastly more valuable when based on a lifetime of data.

> also by having ability to enable/disable access to your data, you have the power of who gets what

But realistically, when are you ever going to disable access? If you want people to be able to read your replies no matter what social network they're using, you're going to make those replies available to every social network.

> and for which purpose also reselling of your data should become illegal to start with

This is my point. The solution here is legal, not technological. Personal data storage doesn't change anything legally, and changing the law would prevent reselling even if you didn't have personal data storage.

It seems important not to confuse the two, in order not to give people false hopes.

I agree that this is not just a technological problem to be solved. Technology by it self can't fix the problems, but it can help nudge the human experience in good or bad way. Right now, we gave our data to large corporations and we got the lovely attention economy thats being feed on human rage, envy and greed.

Solid idea is more in line with revolution and demand for our representatives to give their people internet that can push the humanity forward, and not just let us waist countless hours on doom scrolling.

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