Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid is a platform designed to re-decentralize the web

Re:Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid is a platform designed to re-dece... by confounded on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @01:48AM (#17447856)

That invasive advertising surveillance must happen — or we wont be able to afford to stay in touch with each other — is a very common argument, but not a convincing one to me. This was zucc’s argument to Congress for extracting as much personal data as possible from people.

Surely there must be a middle ground between an app that people enjoy using being worth $570B and employing 25,000 experts to tweak it slightly, and being worth less than nothing after server costs.

I agree with you that should a decentralized social media app take off, it’s likely to be less profitable, but I dont think that necessarily means that no-one wants to work on it, that no-one wants to use it, or that it won’t exist.

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid is a platform designed to re-dece... by gaius on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @04:49AM (#17448522)

That invasive advertising surveillance must happen — or we wont be able to afford to stay in touch with each other — is a very common argument

Just yesterday a Google spokesmodel talked about “balancing user privacy against business needs”

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/29/california_data_pri...

But making profits is not a human right!

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid is a platform designed to re-dece... by brainwad on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @07:25AM (#17449254)

The products wouldn't exist if they didn't make a profit. So really, it's balancing user privacy against user desire for the product to exist.

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid is a platform designed to re-dece... by sorokod on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @05:08AM (#17448603)

Corporations are people too and profit is the oxygen they need.

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid is a platform designed to re-dece... by gaius on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @05:16AM (#17448636)

Balance compliance with the law against desire to make profits, is the accurate translation. Pure Silicon Valley.

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid is a platform designed to re-dece... by rusk on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @07:40AM (#17449313)

Yeah I love seeing corporations have their liberty curtailed in jail when they break the law. /s

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid is a platform designed to re-dece... by ff317 on Tuesday July 03, 2018 @08:09AM (#17449459)

Don't assume the cost of the infrastructure for privacy-invasive advertising is free, or that it's just automatically easy to do such things once you're offering some other user-facing service. Acquiring, storing, correlating, and sharing all of that user data is very expensive in architectural terms. It will vary by business model, but I would imagine anywhere from 20-80% of operating costs go out the window if you architect your systems to only offer the services users actually wanted.

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