That, and there has to be a legal or technical way to prevent them from datamining you anyway. Because seriously, almost no company is going to voluntarily leave money on the table. Why drop old profit source for the new one, when you can have both?
> The answer is for it not to be on their server at all. Have it be on your server. Operating a server should be as simple as operating any other home appliance.
That's an important part of the solution, I believe. Personally, what I'd love to see is the move towards making service providers stop trying to own data. The way SaaS currently works is: I send my data to the service for processing, they basically own it, and I'm lucky if I can even get the data back out and untangled from the service. The way this should be working is that I own and control the data, and I rent their code to be run on it.
Come to think of it, that's how desktop software works, and that's why the abstraction of a file - the one the cloud is desperately trying to kill - is so awesome.
But... operating non-computerized home appliances is difficult, too. Remember all the jokes about the VCR blinking 12:00? This was because every damn thing had it's own completely non-standard, unique interface.
I mean, we've got fewer and fewer clocks we've gotta set, but back in the day, I remember I was the sort of person who would have to jimmy with a friend's car until their in-dash clock was right... and almost nobody I knew had a clock that was right year round, just 'cause they couldn't be bothered to look up or figure out how to set it.
Now, with connected appliances? (as any of your 'social network' appliances would have to be) if you didn't apply the security updates (and maybe if you did) the data would be even more public than it is now.
Not really. It was because the device is a VCR (or a car) that happens to contain a clock and people didn't care enough about the clock feature to bother with setting it. Even the people whose clocks weren't set could still play a video tape or drive to work.
What it points to is the need for good defaults. The default shouldn't be to blink 12:00, nobody actually wants that. It should be to get the time from a GPS receiver or NTP server or something like that. It's a problem caused by no external connectivity, which is no longer an issue today.
> Now, with connected appliances? (as any of your 'social network' appliances would have to be) if you didn't apply the security updates (and maybe if you did) the data would be even more public than it is now.
Security is an issue but it's a separate issue. Huge organizations get pwned all the time. Yahoo, Target, Equifax, OPM, it's a very long list. If the thing holding your data gets hacked, you lose. That doesn't really depend on if it's in your home or not.
For your thing to not get hacked, someone needs go proactively defend that thing, even if defending that thing just means 'install the dang updates' (of course, there's more to it than that, but for most of us, if installing the updates isn't enough, we are compromised and deal with the consequences)
I'm comparing leaving the clock blinking 12:00 to the phone that hasn't been updated in two years. If your data is on devices you control... you need to control the security of said devices, and that's easier said than done.
My point here is that not paying attention to the security of your home appliances has very different and sometimes not obvious consequences to not paying attention to other aspects of home appliance setup.
The issue is that the services have to be funded somehow. If they're funded through data mining, you lose your privacy. So if you want privacy, some other funding source is necessary but not sufficient.
> once your data is on that company's server, how would you even be able to reliably validate what's being done with it?
The answer is for it not to be on their server at all. Have it be on your server. Operating a server should be as simple as operating any other home appliance.