
I want to own the database that my apps use - orndorffgrant
https://orndorffgrant.com/own-your-data-idea/
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chromano
Great post! I've been thinking about it myself for some time. My main concern
is that once you let the user to hold the data, you might introduce a security
issue as it is very unlikely the end user will protect its data as well as you
would as a service provider, especially as you would be subject to prosecution
if you did something "wrong" with the data (read "leaking" or "selling" it).

I guess you are right about APIs, they eventually won't provide what you need.
I'd love to see Solid starting to be used for the apps I use, but honestly I
don't feel like it will happen. I don't understand much about Urbit, but from
what I read that sounds like another world.

That said, I think there's some startups doing some work with regards to data
privacy and security (and it seems like it caught a lot of attention!). As for
getting access to the data itself, I think a sort of "open-source" and
"reverse engineering" approach would help here, meaning that if you have a
proxy between you and the app's server, and supposing you can add plugins to
this proxy, you could hijack the data, make sense of it and store somewhere
else for your own usage.

Obviously, any external processing of the data would have to be granted by the
app itself, but I have a feeling this is what their APIs would contribute
with.

I'd be more than happy to talk more about this and even spend some time
implementing a PoC, let me know if there's anyone else interested here and we
can exchange ideas and/or code/docs/etc.

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Rockvole
It would be simpler to have something like a google drive / dropbox where you
allow access to store things on there to specific apps. Then you allow the
data to be retrieved by another app. If the storing app does an export (say in
csv format) each time you make changes then the data will always be available
for another app to use. I think requiring an app to use a specific external
database probably wont work because app developers have specific needs for
each app, perhaps xml or key-value pairs etc. The app is then relying on a
third party to provide the performance / latency they need. If a universal
database could be chosen I would choose sqlite since that is available on
phones.

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chromano
Yeap, but storing data in things like dropbox/drive/s3 would require the app
to have some sort of indexing in place (I'm thinking about ElasticSearch), as
querying on these storages would perform really bad I think.

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dpc_pw
Urbit.

