
The sad state of personal data and infrastructure - karlicoss
https://beepb00p.xyz/sad-infra.html
======
simonw
I've been working on a project along these lines recently. I've called it
Dogsheep - the basic idea is to have scripts that export all manner of my
personal data (from Google, Apple HealthKit, Twitter, LinkedIn etc) into
SQLite database files, then use my Datasette web app to browse them and run
interesting queries.

More about that here:
[https://dogsheep.github.io/](https://dogsheep.github.io/)

The tools I've built so far are under
[https://github.com/dogsheep](https://github.com/dogsheep)

~~~
rasz
I went similar route after discovering Google Checkout refuses to return my YT
comments. I wrote quick&dirty tempermonkey script logging submitted HTML forms
(addEventListener "submit").

~~~
TurkishPoptart
Did it work the way a scraper does? Curious to know how you did this.

~~~
rasz
I was only interested in stuff I posted on the internet for indexing/easier
search, [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/HTMLFormEle...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/HTMLFormElement/submit_event) and
[http://www.meekostuff.net/blog/Overriding-DOM-
Methods/](http://www.meekostuff.net/blog/Overriding-DOM-Methods/) covered form
submissions, result goes to tempermonkey localstorage (GM_setValue).

------
djhworld
There's a lot of things in this article that I agree with whole heartedly. A
few weeks ago I posted this comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650908)
which shares some of the same frustrations.

Another thing that annoys me right now (and this is a problem of my own
making...) is earlier this year I started taking notes with an app on my iPad
called Notability. It works great with the logitech crayon stylus/pencil and
is useful for jotting down notes when doing online courses etc.

Except I've shot myself in the foot a bit because those notes are now bound to
the app. Yes there is the Notability app for OSX, and yes I should have
anticipated this problem sooner, but that's beside the point, my notes are
locked into the Notability ecosystem. They support this half assed solution to
export them as RTF files or PDFs but you lose stuff like handwriting
recognition.

One project on my TODO list is to see if I can reverse engineer the
proprietary Notability file format, which includes the text recognition and
all the things needed to render the lines that make up your notes. I know
there have been attempts to do this e.g.
[https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/03/31/reverse-engineering-
notabili...](https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/03/31/reverse-engineering-notability-
format/) I just need to put the time aside to make it work

~~~
lifeisstillgood
And one more thing was why doesn't my browser store my history - it just the
URLs of where I have been but the html, the images, the text etc. Then let me
search that.

Someone raised this on here a few weeks ago and it was a gobsmacking moment -
my hand flew to my forehead and I realised yes - that would be so useful but
the big tech firms find it more profitable to have that data on their hard
drives not mine.

~~~
marcosdumay
> Then let me search that.

Like Firefox's Awesome Bar?

~~~
jlokier
The Awesome Bar doesn't search the _content_ of pages you have visited.

I believe that's the exciting idea the GP is talking about.

------
arciini
This is why I think scraping rights is so valuable.

As the article says:

> Best case scenario is if the service is local-first in the first place.
> However, this may be a long way ahead and there are certain technical
> difficulties associated with such designs.

> I'm suggesting a data mirror app, that merely runs in background on client
> side and continuously/regularly sucks in and synchronizes backend data to
> the latest state.

Here are a few premises:

1\. It's a fact that only a small portion of users care heavily about
centralizing and truly owning their data

2\. As such, it's reasonable for companies to not focus on exporting data.
That's not how they get value out of their data

3\. That being said, companies should at least not punish that small group of
users for taking matters into their own hands

Scraping is our solution to this problem, and the least companies can do is
allow well-behaved (rate-limited) scraping.

~~~
choward
I have thought about these issues a lot; especially lately. With regards to
being able to scrape your data or just get your data back from 3rd party's, I
think that's a losing battle. You need to be in control of your data before it
gets to them. Web sites and APIs are constantly changing and sometimes just
disappear. This idea of polling for changes seems very brittle and would never
be up to date.

What I picture is an a program that you use to store your own microblogs,
blogs, contacts, comments, etc. and then you publish to whoever from that app
via their API or crawling.

Imagine you just created a new microblog entry. You can now either post to
your Twitter, Mastodon, etc. accounts with the click of a button. You would
have to poll for replies though and it would be up to you to store them if you
wished (you probably want to if you are storing your replies). As an added
benefit you could see the replies in one place instead of bouncing between two
sites.

The point is, when you create the data, it's yours first. Then if you want to,
you can post it other places. Tools like this are abundant for businesses, but
we don't seem to build tools for actual people anymore.

~~~
shaki-dora
> With regards to being able to scrape your data or just get your data back
> from 3rd party's, I think that's a losing battle.

Both Google and Facebook have tools that allow you to export your data in both
(usable) JSON and HTML.

~~~
choward
That's fine but how often do you export? How do you merge it with other
exported data? Are you exporting your entire history every time? What about
when Google/Facebook breaks their API or get rid of it?

~~~
sroussey
That is why we are creating PrivicyPal -- to set a schedule to download and
merge data from many sources and monitor over time. Will be adding beta
testers soon.

See
[https://www.privicy.com/privicypal/about](https://www.privicy.com/privicypal/about)

------
reggieband
As a counter-point (I'm playing devils advocate because I actually agree with
the author in general): at one time I found an old laptop that I hadn't used
in quite some time. Excitedly I booted it up and dug around the file system to
find ... nothing of interest. I thought there were treasure troves of stuff
there but actually there was very little of interest at all.

It made me think about those hoarder reality TV shows and how there is a
digital equivalent of that. In some ways I'm glad all of my digital data isn't
amassing and following me around. I'm not sure I really care about what I
posted to MySpace pages back in 2003 or usenet in 1998.

This is really a matter of ambivalence to me. On the one hand I would love
detailed data about my history, even down to the exact GPS coordinates of my
location every moment of my life. On the other, I am not sure this data would
truly improve my life in any way. It may be that access to such data could
make my life worse.

~~~
nielsole
I have a location trace over the last year and I am using it for time tracking
(how long was I in the office). Also I have a heatmap of all the places I have
been that is really nice to look at. Also it has helped me in cases where bike
sharing companies said: where did you leave the bike on 27th of September? We
can't find it. Or the doctor claiming I didn't appear on the previous
consultation and I should pay the appointment out of pocket. One look at the
timestamped map and I can recall the situation.

~~~
reggieband
That is really cool. Can I ask where you are storing that data? Is it
something you cooked up yourself or a service you are using?

One of my back-of-the-mind ideas is to combine GPS data like this with some
kind of basic activity-type id. Like "working", "practicing guitar",
"socializing with friends", etc. Then I could get reports on how I spend my
time.

~~~
nielsole
I use the owntracks app with a selfwritten http server that dumps it into a
postgres. Then I use grafana and leaflet for visualization. Regarding your
activity tracking: I already also track pulse and smart watch movement, but
plan on adding more inputs like the travel mode detection on Android (walking,
cycling, driving) That together with my calendar data should give sufficient
data for time reports :)

------
pcr910303
The Solid Project [0] (AFAIK which is led by Tim Berners-Lee) is made to
tackle this exact problem.

It is about defining a standard/protocol to store personal data in a 'pod' and
give minimal/granual access of my pod to web apps. Apps are separated to pods,
and it allows the decoupling of data & functionality. You can switch(upgrade)
from text message to instant messengers without losing any chat history for
example.

It also has an advantage that it prevents lock-in, since one can move their
data around trivially.

Looks like the OP would greatly benefit from this.

[0] [https://solidproject.org](https://solidproject.org)

~~~
smacktoward
Has anyone built an actual, used-in-production app on top of Solid yet?

~~~
choward
Here are some examples: [https://solidproject.org/use-
solid/apps](https://solidproject.org/use-solid/apps)

The problem though is the same with all self-hosting: maintaining a server. It
looks like you're just on your own if you want to use a "solid" app.

------
doublement
Or how about just letting your data vanish, except for items you've made a
specific effort to save (e.g. your own original writing or musical
compositions)?

Technologists seem preoccupied with creating perfect recollection, seemingly
without realizing that people who have this ability innately often find it
burdensome.

Given my druthers, I wouldn't retrieve my data from a service, I'd purge it.

~~~
nine_k
In either case, you control the destiny of your data, either forcing it to an
archive or to /dev/null.

The problem is exactly the lack of such control. Frankly, if you let the data
out, there's no guarantee a copy of them does not linger somewhere.

Having companies have an incentive to get rid of your data after some time,
for profit reasons, might be helpful. For instance, work email is usually
purged promptly after the mandatory retention period expires, so that it could
not be used in litigation.

------
lunch
This got me thinking about personal data storage. I think step 1 in owning our
data is having a place to store it. That storage should be abstracted from the
actual provider(s) so we can migrate and/or replicate our data. It should also
be available from multiple devices. A personal data warehouse like this should
be easy to create, a la 'deploy to heroku'.

It's shocking to me how few people I've met take their personal data storage
seriously. Most folks I know treat Dropbox/Drive like a landfill.

~~~
bhauer
Agreed. I feel as much as we've seen NASs grow into devices that are vaguely
approachable by enthusiasts, there is still a huge amount of ground to cover
before they would be the sort of thing that one could easily deploy in their
parents' house.

There has been piecemeal progress in swinging the pendulum back from cloud-
everything to easier to use edge computing. The Helm email server is one
example. The slightly more plug-and-play approach to modern NASs is another.
And there are others. But you can tell that the vast allocation of R&D is not
going here yet. I do think investors will eventually wake up and realize that
user demand for data control means better edge devices and avoiding reliance
on the centralized cloud.

What I have envisioned for PAO [1] is federated encrypted backup. I would like
to see NASs allow me to basically allocate a percentage of my capacity to
various peers to store encrypted-at-rest duplicates of their data. And vice-
versa. Basically a federated mesh. No need for blockchain or other crypto-hype
nonsense. Just straight authenticated and encrypted file storage.

My opinion is that cloud dominance really traces back to the advent of and
self-reinforcing power of asynchonous Internet connectivity. When Internet
connectivity was often synchronous (think the very early days of DSL), peer-
to-peer networking remained very common. As the number of users using
asynchronous connectivity increased, it became reinforced as more services
centralized data and content. Peer-to-peer is effectively a relic of the past
now. Only today have we started to see some resurgence of symmetric
connectivity (e.g., 1Gbps symmetric fiber). I believe deployment of symmetric
connectivity will be a decentralizing force as more people realize it's
possible to just access your file system and data directly between devices
rather than use an intermediary. And as vendors realize this is an opportunity
space to offer interesting technology (e.g., the likes of Zerotier) to
consumers.

[1] [https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao](https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao)

~~~
lunch
_I would like to see NASs allow me to basically allocate a percentage of my
capacity to various peers to store encrypted-at-rest duplicates of their data_

This is something I've been thinking about, too. We have so many Internet-
connected devices with increasingly cheap storage-- Some universal protocol
for distributing data across this network would be really cool. (I understand
this could sound like blockchain. I have no horse in that race.)

~~~
smacktoward
I would worry about the liability implications of such an approach. If one of
those peers is storing (say) child porn, and some of that porn ends up on my
hardware via automatic duplication, does that implicate me legally in their
crime? If it does, does it matter whether it's on my hardware with or without
my knowledge? If the police identify my hardware as part of that peer's
storage network, is that hardware at risk of being searched and/or seized?
That sort of thing.

------
EGreg
The answer to why the author of this article can’t do any of the things they
list is simple. It is hard to write the software. The data is there but some
program has to use it.

The author asks why he needs some start up to take his data and then trust
them to do things. It’s because that start up spent a lot of money to build
the software to run on their servers and now they don’t want to give it away
for free.

In my opinion, this is the root cause of most of the issues with our data and
control on the web in general. There was a time when the web itself disrupted
the centralized networks of the day like America online, MSN, and CompuServe.
The centralized services we use today such as Facebook, Google, Amazon,
Twitter and others could have never been built unless a permission less
platform like the web existed and disrupted centralized platforms. The
centralized services we use today such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter
and others could have never been billed unless a permission list platform like
the web existed disrupted America online and the others. They had invested a
lot in the infrastructure that the web leader replaced. They were extracting
rents and controlling the platform.

Today we need something like that but the infrastructure we need to disrupt
was built by Facebook, Google, etc. Wordpress and OpenStreetMaps is just one
example.

That’s what I have been putting my money into for 8 years and open sourcing:

[https://qbix.com/platform](https://qbix.com/platform)

[https://qbix.com/token](https://qbix.com/token)

Take it, use it, it’s free. Build on it Whatever solutions you want to
manipulate whatever data you want. And perhaps more importantly, host software
for entire communities of people who want to collaborate and connect with each
other. Not just manage their personal data.

Feedback welcome on how to make it better. We are planning to officially
launch later next year to be like a Wordpress of 2020.

~~~
tannhaeuser
Hey, I just want to say your post generally resonated with me and definitely
made me want to check out qbix. I've also spent years on developing software
that I'm giving away for free - most of it anyway, but not the parts that
would enable others to offer commercial hosting at scale. My software is
"just" implementing standards (ISO and OASIS) though, so users don't have to
spend their time on proprietary languages, APIs, markup, protocols, etc. With
your initial statement on non-free software by start ups and your conclusion
to give it all away, I thought you might be interested in this standard-
oriented approach as kind of a middle ground between proprietary vs free/open
SW.

------
samirillian
Interesting to compare to article that came through yesterday about giving up
on semantic web, where the whole movement got a sound drubbing in the HN
comments.

These are infrastructure problems, they should be treated as such, i.e.,
maintained by tax dollars.

The failure of the semantic web and the sad state of personal data are
primarily failures of the free market to solve these problems, imho.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21823869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21823869)

~~~
robenkleene
This doesn't seem like a failing of the free market. The free market has
already created products that solved this problem, and they are some of the
most popular products in history, but people are moving off of them, e.g.:

\- People are moving from Microsoft Office to Google Docs

\- Designers are moving from Sketch/Photoshop/Illustrator to Figma

\- People are moving from Evernote/Text Files/Whatever to Notion

\- People are moving from HTML files to Webflow

\- People have already moved from native mail clients to Gmail

There's a problem here, but it isn't that the free market hasn't solved this
problem, it's that people are choosing other features (mainly collaboration)
as more important than data ownership.

Note that this is a transition mainly driven by tech people, none of these
products have gone mainstream yet (excluding Gmail of course), and the
products that offer data ownership are still far more popular overall. But if
the mainstream follows tech peoples lead, that won't be for long.

~~~
samirillian
> people are choosing other features (mainly collaboration) as more important
> than data ownership

If it were treated like infrastructure, we could have both.

Pointing to a product that got replaced by another product doesn't inherently
prove anything.

And seriously, who uses Gmail voluntarily? The complete non-existence of a
suitable SMTP implementation is a pretty good example of a _clear_ failure of
the market to properly allocated resources.

edit - thanks for pointing out Figma though, might have to check that out

------
sorryitstrue
Pretend we didn't have computers and people wanted to store all the facts in
their lives - how many people could manage a library / filing system rich
enough to catalog the level of information we're expecting to keep here?

~~~
choward
> Pretend we didn't have computers and people wanted to store all the facts in
> their lives

This is a pretty moot point since if we didn't have computers we wouldn't have
things recording a lot of the data in that article to begin with. For example,
with location, you could write down where you are every minute of the day, but
that isn't very practical. Luckily, we have computers to automate that. Does
that mean you should have to give that data away to a third party?

> how many people could manage a library / filing system rich enough to
> catalog the level of information we're expecting to keep here

Nobody could do that manually. That's the job of computers. I suppose you
could keep a journal and store boxes of pictures and a lot of paper. It would
be a pain, take up a lot of space, and take forever to search through. Luckily
we do have computers and they happen to be really good at searching. So you
should be able to just store this stuff on your computer and have it assist
you with owning that data.

Instead what we have is a world where you upload everything to the cloud so
someone else owns the data and you have no idea what's happening with it. They
also get to choose how the data is presented to you. Since your data is spread
among so many companies it hard to get the aggregations mentioned in the
article. Usually the only way that happens is companies agreeing to share your
data with each other. Most people are okay with this since it's "free".

~~~
sorryitstrue
My point is, people's minds aren't caught up to the scale of data, and I don't
think there is a technology solution for it. We now have more data and more
technology but it's not solving the problem.

Hell I don't always know where I'm going to put all the groceries I take home.

EDIT - to add - too much data isn't really useful. When we are talking
personal data collection it's basically a librarian's job, which is non-
trivial

~~~
jakeywankenobi
> My point is, people's minds aren't caught up to the scale of data, and I
> don't think there is a technology solution for it.

I totally agree with the general thrust of this argument. I'd like to hear
more about use cases for this kind of personally-owned, aggregated data store.
Once this article started talking about searching over, say, notes and
highlights from articles and blog posts, I started to see specific use cases
that seem totally compelling. However, it's not clear to me how this part of
the data ownership conversation matches up with the seemingly more principles-
driven data ownership conversation.

Theoretically there's nothing stopping you from building some of these more
specific implementations (which the author has done--btw those projects looks
really cool).

------
jakeywankenobi
Are there any other interesting articles on good use cases for this kind of
centralized data ownership. The syndication concept and the discussion about
data rights aside, why else might I want to have all the data I ever create or
interact with in aggregate like this? The author has referenced a few really
interesting projects they worked on, curious if there are more good ones.

~~~
karlicoss
I'd be interested to know too. One reason I started writing this all up is to
harvest more of other people's setups, tools and workarounds -- I'll be sure
to link them later.

~~~
jakeywankenobi
Sounds good, thanks. Cool blog btw, I poked around for a while. Nice work!

------
Jeff_Brown
> (typically) the more something machine friendly the less it's human
> friendly.

I believe I have solved some of that problem. Hode (the Higher Order Data
Editor), a kind of generalization of graph databases, lets a user enter data
in a manner which I believe is as similar as possible to natural language. To
encode the fact "cats kill birds" as a "kill" relationship between "cats" and
"birds", you just write "cats #kill birds". Relationships involving other
relationships can be represented with similar ease, and relationships
involving any number of elements. The query language is not much more
complicated -- for instance, everything that kills birds would be "/e /it
#kills birds".

[https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode](https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode)

------
ochredoke
This worries me too - a lot. So much so that I'm working on a video series
documenting the creation of a personal photo & video storage system from
scratch. My belief is that one way to extricate our data from big tech's
catacombs is to spread more widely the skills needed to build out personal
data stores.

I'm starting with photos & videos because my own collection is trapped in
Flickr, and it may not be long for this world. I intend to build out such a
system and publish instructional videos on how to do it as I go along.

Imagine a world in which more or less everyone can do this. It's not such a
long shot, don't you think?

------
hinkley
I can’t help but think that this glut of resources we are burning on deep
library/platform stacks and spying on users might be better spent on attaching
more metadata to all information flowing through our systems. Some provenance
might be good.

I’ve seen a bit of how Boeing tracks parts and doing something simpler but
similar for data might be tractable now, except that i think it would take
APIs that worked substantially different than conventional code. Except
perhaps in Ruby and Node (thinking in particular about htmlsafe tagging in
Rails)

------
mellowdream
I actually do share many of the author's thoughts on how maddening it can be
to collect specific pieces of data that seemingly should be collectable but
aren't because of some stupid reasons xyz. To play devil's advocate, though -
Is it really malice, or just that people rarely think about these particular
use cases in the first place?

It seems like a lot of the things and products mentioned here, if released by
an independent dev or small team, could similarly be overlooked. I can't
imagine most of the engineers I know (and I suppose especially not rich
megacorps) to really ever consider the .01% of people (the kind of demographic
you'd find on HN, I guess) saving ALL browsing history across browsers
according to some universal standard or LinkedIn statistics or YouTube text
history.

OT-ish: I can see how this would be relevant for most people living well
enough, say, like middle-upper class America, who can afford these
technologies and to care about the multitude of examples presented, but is
there a conversation about how much data we should or need to be collecting
(to say nothing of handing off to 3rd parties) at all in the first place?

I've always felt that relying and interacting with less technology (or at
least making efforts within reason to) was better for my own quality of life
(less tracking, less worrying about posting regrettable stuff, sticking to
basic principles like "move more, eat less" instead of obsessively counting
stuff on my old MyFitnessPal and Fitbit) - surely I'm not alone?

~~~
karlicoss
Great to hear we resonate!

This is a valid point, I kind of admit these are sort of first-world problems.
But my main motivation for raising this issues in the first place is to learn
better, process information more effeciently, have better memory, and this is
something I wish to use to work, learn and reason about things that really
matter, like climate change or solving poverty, etc.

Regarding tracking less -- I guess people are different, I do know people who
are happy to just stick to 'move more, eat less'. For me personally such
maintenance is boring, and looking at stuff like workout/sleep data etc really
motivates me to learn more about it and keep going. I really hate going for
another run but at least I'll have a datapoint after it!

I feel like the actually stressful bit is having to think about tracking. If
it was done automatically and you didn't have to think about it, then why not?
You'd always find people who are obsessed about doing (or not doing) things
even without counting I guess.

------
chacha2
Isn't, overwhelmingly, the problem the economic model all software is made
under? Any attempt to come up with a solution to this that ignores this fact
will never treat the root course of the issue.

~~~
karlicoss
Maybe! But I'm certainly not feeling in capacity to challenge the current
economic model :)

------
droitbutch
One reason this 'sad state' exists is because content providers (for example
websites, apps, etc) need to generate revenue and the most prevalent method is
advertising.

Micropayments would go a long ways to shifting providers away from advertising
and towards pay-per-use. Many users would not object to paying a fraction of
cent for reading an article - especially if it would enable the provider to
remove the tracking and invasion of privacy all in order to make a buck.

------
eismcc
The reason I started / made cloudcmd [0] back around 2009 is that I saw this
coming. My goal was to build a decentralized storage system with search
capabilities and smart enough that you could rebalance storage based on cost
and convenience.

Is now the time to restart this?

[0] [https://github.com/briangu/cloudcmd](https://github.com/briangu/cloudcmd)

------
colinsul
I've been using Tiller for a few months:

[https://www.tillerhq.com/](https://www.tillerhq.com/)

Totally happy to pay for someone to maintain connections between bank APIs and
a Google Spreadshert. Curious how long they'll last.

------
tyingq
I agree it's sad, but there's an incentive to keep your data captive. This
problem isn't really a technical issue.

------
jborichevskiy
Wonderful post!

> Why can't I search across watched youtube videos even though most of them
> have subtitles hence allow for full text search?

This blows my mind every time I'm on youtube... so much potential, and yet.

> Often, a friend recommends you a book so you want it to add to your reading
> list.

Yep. For a while I was collecting them in a spreadsheet. After about two years
I've realized it's actually a lot more about the _context_ of why/where/when I
added a book rather than it simply existing in a long list. Even though I had
"Source" and "Date Added" as columns, I (still) have no way of grouping them
by topic cross-referenced with my notes.

Also, the conversation in which I received the recommendation likely has
valuable context I haven't included, and good luck deep-linking to a message.
(Telegram handles this OK, but Gmail? Or god forbid iMessage).

> Why can't I see what was my heart rate (i.e. excitement) and speed side by
> side with the video I recorded on GoPro while skiing?

Another angle I've considered: the past four (text/email/GPS) interactions
with (some person) has resulted in higher stress levels ... this is an insight
I typically extract from writing about my day. Would be interesting to have it
suggested to me. Yes, lots of privacy implications here.

> It's just a matter of regularly fetching new stories/comments by a person
> and showing new items, right?

Not sure if you've seen fraidycat [0] and the discussion [1]. Basically, a
fetch-and-consume model for blogs, Twitter, etc with frequency/priority
levels.

> Why am I forced to manually copy transactions from different banking apps
> into a spreadsheet?

Plaid [2] looks promising, but I haven't built anything noteworthy with it
yet.

> Why can't I easily share my web or book highlights with a friend?

This is ridiculously hard. I think my favorite solution to date is to copy-
paste the whole article into a Google Drive doc and annotate it. Not a good
solution, I know.

> I wonder what computing pioneers like Douglas Engelbart (e.g. see Augmenting
> Human Intellect) or Alan Kay thought/think about it and if they'd share my
> disappointment.

I imagine they would be/are very upset.

0 -
[https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues](https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues)

1 -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802952)

2 - [https://plaid.com/](https://plaid.com/)

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kossae
Just a quick grammatical note:

> Monzo API only allows to fetch all of your transactions within 5 minutes of
> authentication.

The referenced link states:

> After a user has authenticated, your client can fetch all of their
> transactions, and after 5 minutes, it can only sync the last 90 days of
> transactions. If you need the user’s entire transaction history, you should
> consider fetching and storing it right after authentication.

So I would think the sentence would be:

"Monzo API only allows to fetch the last 90 days of your transactions after 5
minutes of authentication."

...which actually seems worse.

~~~
perennate
I don't understand. The two sentences both seem to match the referenced link
-- the first says that it is only possible to fetch all transactions in the
first five minutes, while the second says that after five minutes, you can
only fetch the last 90 days of transactions (so, can't fetch all). Are you
saying it is worse that you can still fetch transactions after five minutes?

