So my data is stored in my Pod, and I can grant different platforms and services access to my data? So for example if I have a photo that I want to share on some sort of social platform, the resource is being pulled directly from my pod?
He's been concerned with this type of stuff for a long time. There are plenty of articles about him talking about the NSA, tech giants, etc. I think he created a social media platform a few years ago as an alt to facebook.
Someone as visionary as TBL surely saw the problems with centralization very early on, even before the WWW started gaining traction.
His original goals for the HyperText project[1] involved two phases. The first to build web browsers, and the second to make it easy for users to publish content. This second phase was never completed, AFAIK.
We've had many attempts over the years to address this, but by the time tech silos and web giants were getting established, and advertising starting to corrupt the user experience—mid to late 90s—it was already too late. Millions of people were getting online, and the understanding that the web works by services being provided, often for "free", by large tech companies, was being ingrained in popular culture.
Reversing that notion once the web had matured, and people had become used to giving away their data and personal information to companies, became more difficult as time went on.
As much as privacy conscious nerds will applaud this effort to take the power back to users, I think it's too little, too late, for it to gain any real mainstream adoption. It would have to be done with a reboot of the current web, or a separate network altogether; not this web3 nonsense. The likelihood of either succeeding is very low.
I don't want to sound pessimistic, and genuinely hope I'm wrong about this, for the good of all of us, but I am a bit _miffed_, to put it lightly, that none of these tech visionaries saw these problems early on and tried to fix them when it was possible, and that we ended up with a corrupted version of what the web was supposed to be.
There is a lot of dismay related to the term "web 3" since it is related to blockchain tech and dare I say cryptocurrency. I was surprised to see he mentioned it. I'm a big fan of decentralization, but I also know there are a lot of people who are salty that they didn't get in on crypto at the beginning when it was offered to them on a platter in their native language of technology, and thus shun anything related to it. This includes the term "web 3".
GOOD: Its concept of separating personal data into a separate store/service/db which promotes autonomy and data portability. Its documentation. Its developer community. BAD: it doesn't support delegation (e.g. GNAP). It isn't multi-contextual. It costs money to host or requires IT skills to self-host, making this a solution only for elites. UGLY: Its aggregation of personal data of many users creates a honeypot. It's a partial solution--it lacks a governance/legal dimension that is required because data can't be owned (privacy isn't the opposite of sharing, privacy is about trust in how data is used after being shared from a personal data store, and there's no technology solution to that).
Due to (i) a laissez faire public attitude, esp. in the US, that "if this was a serious problem, someone would have done something about it", (ii) a pervasive misunderstanding of how important information privacy is to democracy and society and (iii) regulatory capture by big tech it, will be a long time before there is a regulatory solution (esp. in the US). As for historical parallels, they're not promising. It was decades after the excesses by the "robber barons" and their unfettered capitalism in the late 1800s before the US government built institutions and laws to push back by creating consumer protection (child labor laws, the food and drug administration, the social security administration, etc.) As an alternative to waiting for government, some of us are exploring a combination of contract law and a personal "identity agent" (an app running on your devices that includes a personal datastore). This agent makes your data available to a service provider's apps and sites under "human information license" that states a set of reasonable, non-exploitative terms. This approach requires voluntary participation on the part of the service provider. There may be sufficient incentives for some kinds of providers to participate, but admittedly it's an uphill climb. WRT the contract notion, what I envision is similar to JLINC's information sharing contract (https://sisa.jlinc.org/v1/3b39160c2b9ae7b2ef81c3311c7924f1c4...)
11 comments
[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 31.5 ms ] threadHis original goals for the HyperText project[1] involved two phases. The first to build web browsers, and the second to make it easy for users to publish content. This second phase was never completed, AFAIK.
We've had many attempts over the years to address this, but by the time tech silos and web giants were getting established, and advertising starting to corrupt the user experience—mid to late 90s—it was already too late. Millions of people were getting online, and the understanding that the web works by services being provided, often for "free", by large tech companies, was being ingrained in popular culture.
Reversing that notion once the web had matured, and people had become used to giving away their data and personal information to companies, became more difficult as time went on.
As much as privacy conscious nerds will applaud this effort to take the power back to users, I think it's too little, too late, for it to gain any real mainstream adoption. It would have to be done with a reboot of the current web, or a separate network altogether; not this web3 nonsense. The likelihood of either succeeding is very low.
I don't want to sound pessimistic, and genuinely hope I'm wrong about this, for the good of all of us, but I am a bit _miffed_, to put it lightly, that none of these tech visionaries saw these problems early on and tried to fix them when it was possible, and that we ended up with a corrupted version of what the web was supposed to be.
[1]: https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html
I get that the next thing says "or self-host" but... reclaim our data from tech giants so we can give it back to tech giants?
I wonder if there any historical parallels to inform us, and what would that look like here?