Re:Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests e...
by shadowgovt on Thursday October 17, 2019 @01:55PM
(#21284624)
Some significant incentives or legal controls would likely be necessary to realize that. Companies have zero incentive (beyond possibly performance if network bandwidth is an issue, and it's not) to (c), since that gives you carte blanche to steal their implementation, reverse-engineer it, and use it outside their control. I don't anticipate they'll facilitate that voluntarily.
It's also a lot easier to debug and improve software running on machines in a cloud one owns than on local heterogeneous architectures out "in the wild." Ask anyone who's done backend web development vs. frontend how fun it is to get "It don't work" bug reports from end-users with no logs and only spotty event metrics to guess what failure mode they got into and how they could get out of it (including failure modes such as "their ad blocker decided to kill half your functionality because your JavaScript's name had 'ad' in the URL").
There's a lot of incentives aligned for thin clients and fat servers.
I'd like to see regulations addressing this issue directly, in addition to more strict pro-privacy regulation. For instance, I'd love to see it so that data, software and compute become independent - instead of current vertical integration. That is, I want to a) own my data, b) choose where it'll be processed, and c) have the software processing it come to the data - this way the vendor supplying software for c) won't be able to take the data and sell it or hold it for ransom.