Re:The Price of Free Is Actually Too High
by TeMPOraL on Monday April 16, 2018 @01:18AM
(#16846803)
> 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.
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.
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.