I like the idea, but I wonder how this works in practice. If I grant ACME Inc. access to my “profile picture,” for example, won't they just copy the file and store it on their own servers (be it for performance reasons, tracking, ease of development, whatever)? How does this keep me in control?
I don’t see how you can prevent others from collecting your data without laws and enforcement, which seem to be hard to pass and maintain (see: GDPR and right to be forgotten. Sometimes they work, but sometimes they don’t, and they have their own issues).
The technology is already here for people to collect and publish their own data. Most people in the US can purchase their own VPS, host their own website, use federated media and self-hosted services. Lots of sites and institutions let you request your data, though sometimes the process is obscure, and you can scrape any data about you that is visible to you. The main obstacle here is that it seems the vast majority of people aren’t interested, I wouldn’t expect a layman to even know what “self-hosted” means.
It only works when the majority of good actors adopt it as a standard. Effectively an agreement to abide by it. Or, as the article notes, it's enforced as a part of policy. In Europe it's being pitched as a method to help assure GDPR compliance. Of course that likely falls apart if what would be good actors don't agree to utilize or adhere to the standard. It probably needs to be picked up as a W3C standard or something to see broad use.
Another vote for the Pocketbook (~€100 on online stores in Europe). As the parent above, I never connected it to the internet, not once. I use a USB cable to add new books. The Pocketbook is also recommended by Mozilla's Privacy Not Included list as the most privacy-friendly e-reader. I wrote a blog post about my Kindle → Kobo → Pocketbook experience: https://suffix.be/blog/search-perfect-ereader/
Good on them but how does this work? If my neighbour scans my WiFi network and uploads it to BeaconDB I didn’t exactly opt-in, did I? The privacy policy mentions you can add ‘_optout’ to the WiFi name, so it’s more opt-out instead of opt-in?
This line refers to opting in to using your device to collect this data. Apple and Google are taking advantage of their global user coverage by using their devices to collect this data without their consent.
Your WiFi network is broadcasting its presence 10 times a second in all directions. It is well known that you should not put sensitive information in your network SSID, for example, as anybody nearby can pick that up. Hence, you can opt out here instead.
While most users probably don't realize that they contribute to Wifi crowd sourcing, AFAIR using locations services is opt-in on iOS. So "without their consent" doesn't seem true. The info popup also explicitly mentions the WiFi location crowd sourcing.
> If my neighbour scans my WiFi network and uploads it to BeaconDB I didn’t exactly opt-in, did I?
To clarify: all phones doing geolocation are already uploading your AP macaddr to remote location services, but BeaconDB will *not* publish this information in cleartext.
Any data dump will contain only non-reversible cryptographically hashed data or aggregated data.
You can truncate the hash to cause collisions, meaning that one MAC address does not map to one location. This requires the client to be aware of multiple physically nearby MACs in order to get a location, as it then needs to estimate which "possible" locations are most likely.
This is a really interesting problem, and I've loved thinking about it recently. If you're keen on it too I'm happy to discuss further, feel free to reach out.
You can opt to hide your SSID and use 5GHz WiFi which doesn't reach too far, gets attenuated through walls, so it's basically kind of useless as a geolocation beacon.
Why does it need a power cable? To me the main selling point of e-ink displays is that they should be able to last weeks if not months on a single charge...
I want to make a version with a battery. But I don't know when I will get this done. My goal is to make it last at least half a year. 6 months I think is the minimum standard for a thing that is supposed to hang on the wall and not be a hassle to babysit.
A battery adds a lot of complexity and cost for testing, certification and shipping. And it adds another failure mode.
So I decided against it for the current version.
I still don't understand how one can retract access once given. If I share my purchase history with some financial web app and later decide to retract access the web app will no longer get new data, but how can I be sure they don't keep a copy of my old data around? Same with GDPR. I often ask companies to remove my data, and legally they should, but I highly doubt many of them do indeed scrap all my data. I still need to trust the other party to honor my wishes (and follow the law) which makes me wonder if Solid or Schluss can help removing my data.
The solution is social, not technical. The relevant authorities have the right to audit the process and do so in certain cases.
Keeping your data after this request has a tiny benefit to the company - not that many people retract access, and one individual's data is not that valuable. On the other hand, intentionally keeping and using that carries significant financial risk of fines if found out; so a prudent organization simply won't do that - otherwise, it'll just be a huge expense for no good reason after e.g. some disgruntled ex-employee blows the whistle on this practice.
Recently I've been exploring an idea of extension of authorization frameworks like OAuth or GNAP where you can authorize not only access to your data directly but execution of specific computation (be it a specific revision of container image) on it. You would review, in advance, what would be done your data and if suspicious just reject. Ideally the web service pulls the container image and run it on their host, then return the result of the computation to the third-party, keeping the original your data secret. You wouldn't have to give the plain data which would easily be copied in first place. The problem is, I'm not sure if the class of application that can be implemented in this scheme is large enough to be useful.
Agree, you're basically adding another middleman which now also has all your data.
> Same with GDPR. I often ask companies to remove my data, and legally they should, but I highly doubt many of them do indeed scrap all my data
Anecdotal: When GDPR came, the companies I worked with/in took it REALLY serious and spent huge amounts of money and resources to change ALL of their processes to label and clearly isolate data with customer-identified and identifiable content. Not necessarily because they had a change of mind about privacy, but because the risk and the penalty if found non-compliant was so high ("up to €20 million, or 4% of worldwide turnover for the preceding financial year – whichever is HIGHER (!)", PER incident!).
Some level of user-data privacy was already in place, but suddenly all understood the risk of not sufficiently isolating identifiable data (data which in itself is not personal information, but could be combined with other data to identify the user)
So at least in my direct experience GDPR caused a huge shift in many company mindsets from "let's store now and review later" to "wait, what is this data?", and all departments which store data from the field had to start answering to a data protection entity within the company about all the data they have or intend to collect.
It literally forced companies which always played with the idea of one day utilizing harvested data to create some undefined value in the future to challenge themselves. And many companies concluded "we don't know what type of data we have, it's too risky/expensive, scrape the servers and delete it".
Those were all large international companies though, maybe smaller companies acted differently. And for sure your typical data-collecting companies (FAANG) are a completely different story.
But the complexity for a small company with smaller processes to become GDPR-compliant is much lower, with the penalty risking to not just hurt you but immediately send you into bancrupcy. So for a small company especially in Europe it would be plain-stupid to not have GDPR-compliant processes...
Of course there is still trust involved. Every time you cooperate with somebody else booth of you have some assumption what the other will do. You trust that a webshop will send you your product after you have bought it, etc. To give a foundation for this trust we have laws. It would be illegal to sell you a product and just keep the money without giving you the product.
This is the same with data protection and GDPR. They could just say that they deleted it and keep a copy on their own. BUT using such systems or asking them (in a documented way) to delete your data is a really strong signal from your side what your assumptions are. This will make the fines much higher if a data protection authority would find out that a company kept the data when you have already shown your strong request to delete it. So in a way these mechanism should make it easier for you to trust the other side to do their part because the fines will just get bigger.
> Same with GDPR. I often ask companies to remove my data, and legally they should, but I highly doubt many of them do
I was talking once with a friend who deals with GDPR issues at their company. They said that they’re required to keep a record of deletion requests so it can be spelunked through vendors for a full deletion. This often creates more data than was originally deleted.
I always wondered if this is US specific. In Europe, as far as I know, the package would simply be delivered by the neighbor, they return the next day, or you have to get it from the local convenience store or some centralized lock-box.
Package theft is a problem, but it’s not as rampant as you’d believe from reading internet comments. The number of packages delivered to houses in the US every day is staggeringly high, so even a small percentage of package thefts will manifest as a lot of anecdotes.
Package theft also varies heavily by location. I live in a medium sized city but I actually don’t know anyone who has had a package stolen off their porch. I’ve easily had over a thousand packages left at my (highly visible) porch all afternoon over the years without a single theft.
OTOH, if I lived in a few certain cities I wouldn’t want to leave any packages lying out for any period of time.
I also do not know of anyone who has experienced package theft in the US between a few cities on both coasts and suburbs in a variety of states. But they all live in upper middle class or richer neighborhoods or buildings, so there is probably a lot of selection bias.
