
Data Factories - kaboro
https://stratechery.com/2018/data-factories/
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kthejoker2
My desert island side project is to develop a blockchain-based decentralized
identity syndication system where you publish everything to your own personal
API and then grant access to external parties, with telemetry, revocation, the
whole 9 yards.

Basically the inverse of the Internet. The tech is straightforward, the user
experience and the culture would need to get there.

~~~
jonnydubowsky
I imagine that a successful implementation of this will eventually become a
feature of the web, agnostic to any one company, and interoperable across the
current cloud services as well as the emergent Web3.0 protocols and federated
social networks. Solid, Keybase, Blockstack, Civic, uPort, Sovrn and many
others are doing their part to get us there. I've found a great deal of
insight via [https://www.weboftrust.info](https://www.weboftrust.info)

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rch
Has anyone else been wondering if this latest discussion will move beyond tech
companies, credit cards, and traffic cameras to focus on the moral right to
privacy and individual liberty?

I'm not sure if a plurality of people in the U.S. believe that they _should_
have an expectation of privacy... or at least they seem willing to trade it
for loose credit, free services, and a general feeling of security.

~~~
skybrian
Consider that gossip is pretty universal and celebrity gossip is big business.
We are certainly not consistent about protecting other people's privacy. At
best, the anonymity of the city happens because most people are not
interesting enough to gossip about.

Social networks often enable people's worst tendencies but they were always
there.

In a way, fiction might be considered pro-privacy because it attracts
attention that might otherwise be directed at real people.

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666_howitzer
> the lever is demanding transparency on exactly what these companies are
> doing.

I think a even more powerful lever would be having laws that allow consumers
easily export their data from one platform to another or make internet
companies adopt a common standard for increasing interoperability of users
data.

~~~
nine_k
Or even not a law, but a standard / RFC and a working implementation of it by
a few large companies, for others to follow suit.

If only there'd be an incentive for a few large companies to pull this off,
the way they do with other standards (see HTML5 or AV1 for recent examples).

~~~
jdc
"Set a common standard, or we'll set it for you."

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dkrich
I've held the same position since the CA scandal first broke and I still stand
by it: that regulation is not that likely.

The reason I believe that is pretty simple- the government typically doesn't
get things done and its been that way for a long time. That's due to a number
of reasons. In Facebook and Google's cases its the powerful lobbying ability
and best attorneys combined with elected officials' extreme risk-aversion to
actually doing things combined with a pretty poor understanding of the
situation by law makers. It's far safer to make grandiose statements and
finger-wag than to gain support for, and ultimately pass legislation.

People hoping for regulation should be careful what they wish for, as I'd bet
that if something does pass, it is precisely these companies that will help
author it which likely won't be great for competition.

~~~
confounded
GDPR seemed like a pretty good law to me, and I am not exactly a huge fan of
the EU.

Same deal for the California Consumer Privacy Act.

These are laws which people hoped for, and got done.

Ultimately, it increasingly seems like advertising-surveillance as a business
model may not be one we want to live with. The costs are externalized very
effectively, and it’s kind of hard to know what to do with them.

~~~
laingc
I'm also not a fan of the EU, and I'm very much not a fan of the GDPR. It's a
poorly thought-out law, written along the lines of Continental civil law
jurisprudence, which I personally believe is inherently inferior to common law
lawmaking and is implicitly anti-innovation and anti-market.

The right not to be subject to automated decision-making is a typically short-
sighted example.

~~~
maxxxxx
"is implicitly anti-innovation and anti-market."

Based on what are you saying this? As long as the rules are the same for all
competition in a market will still happen.

I also hope that the GDPR will move the focus of innovation away from sucking
up more and more data to do better advertising to other areas.

~~~
derefr
IIRC GDPR is considered regressive, in the same sense that a flat corporate
tax is regressive: it imposes a higher burden on small bootstrapped companies
than it does on larger companies (in this case, because of the legal fees
required to get audited for compliance, and the extra engineering work that's
not going toward product.) Very small companies can get priced out of the
market entirely, and so never live to become large companies. Insofar as those
companies were potential innovators, GDPR can be said to be stifling that
innovation.

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tareqak
I find the author's claim here both believable (as in it might actually solve
the problem) and highly unlikely (giving away what you are selling could be
argued to be a business-ending affair):

 _Quote_ The most important thing that regulators could do is force Facebook
and Google — and all data collectors — to disclose their factory output. Give
users the ability to see not simply what they put in — which again, Google and
Facebook do (and which GDPR requires), but also what comes out after all of
the inputs are mixed and matched. _End Quote_

What would this even look like? How could a user even recognize/test that it
was about them beyond the things that seem obvious to them?

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pcarolan
If they were required to disclose their output schemas, researchers and
journalists could help laymen figure out the implications. It doesn’t have to
be perfect, just public.

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opportune
Unfortunate naming collision in that “data factory” is already a term in tech

~~~
tcmb
'Data refinery' would be even more spot on as a metaphor, I think.

~~~
dstroot
Data distillery?

