Usually purely technical solutions to societal problems won't bring you far. It is still not bad to have them, because they essentially show what would be possible, if we just wanted. Helps in discussion as well if of all people Tim Berners-Lee was part of it.

However: we have issues of education around the topic and our jurisdictive let's the big internet corps get away with too much. Starting with taxes and privacy down to the societal effects their algorithms have.

What ad networks do is the digital equivalent of filming and spying on people who walk by your storefront. What they do, how they do it and the effects it has on society are wrong. Online Advertisement is probably one of the big drivers of the political division we are seeing lately, because controversial topics produce more engagement and more engagement is what people selling ads want.

If you'd explain the current practise to common folk, most of them clearly don't think is okay. This means both education and media isn't doing their job.

Which is also legal, at least in the UK, and not many people have a problem with it. I think well-known, major abuses will need to occur before people take this seriously.

If the data is not processed at the edge, how is nothing recorded? This smells like extremely minced words.

IANAL (definitely not a German one) but I'm almost certain that even post-2017 it's still illegal to take video in a public space and send it elsewhere, without a sign, even if that video is not in some sense "preserved" elsewhere.

Frankly, I think you could even persist it to disk as long as it was pruned within 24 hours and reasonably say it’s not recorded.

Otherwise I’m not sure how you can argue ANY data is “unrecorded”. Writing to a hardware buffer in the camera module would seem like “recording” to me by the strict standard.

And I studied Film in Germany and had to deal with precisely this a hundred times. If WallDecaux is doing this, it is at least a legal grey area, unless they operate on private property, look at their own private property and have a sign that says there is a camera in operation.

wait a minute. i know there are currently startups that offer this exact type of analytics. and from what i know these types of analytics are extremely beneficial to both consumers and store owners. what exactly is the problem here?

What "extreme benefits" do I derive from being filmed and analyzed by stores I happen to walk past?

this is already happening and it's already providing value.

What does a filmed image give you that isn't reflected by sales numbers?

The goal of tracking isn't to make and sell better products, the goal is to create an environment in which the product you already got gets sold more. So essientially people who track you want to manipulate you into buying shit you don't need at prices you wouldn't pay unless manipulated.

Tracking people who would buy your product anyways isn't all that interesting: you've already got them.

since on street analytics are already beneficial to everyone, consumers and providers, why should they be opt-in? they should be, and currently are, automatic opt-in with an option to opt-out. you are walking on the street, so any privacy is gone just from walking outside of your home.

And I hope this:

> since on street analytics are already beneficial to everyone, consumers and providers, why should they be opt-in?

is a joke. It's pure authoritarianism.

Things like bank account information (PSD2), health care records, smart energy meters.

Usage meanwhile by non-US public sector, corporations (worried about industrial espionage), ethical consumers, could be enough to get it to that sate.

What I was told by the Polypoly.eu guys is that they were pushing for and helping with the policy making that led to the GDPR. They said that once it gets weaponized, using e.g. ML, it becomes /very/ effective at protecting an individual's privacy.

Think seeing some picture of yourself drunk at a stag night in a strip club on FB and marking it for being moved to your private pod (for memory's sake) or deleted (because you hold a leadership position and the picture doesn't resonate 'enough' with your carefully crafted social archetype).

Now the pod software will ask FB to remove the picture with a timeframe X in compliance with GDPR. Including each and every copy of the content they hold. All this happens automatically.

This also triggers a process that checks if the data has disappeared from the public after timeframe X has passed.

If not, the whole thing gets added to a class action lawsuit bundle by an AI. This also happens automatically.

When the lawsuit reaches critical mass, it gets filed in Brussels. Automatically.

Regarding 2): This is indeed a big problem still. But even more so is why people use e.g. FB in the first place.

I think it will require some sort of services running atop the the pod infrastructure to make up for the loss of convenience the disappearance of certain data from platforms like FB has on end users.

And I see a missing piece here, at the end, in the approaches of Inrupt/Polypoly.

1) They will play ball because they can incorporate the pod data into their advertising platform. They may even start hosting pods for the people who trust them. Pods allow them to sell advertisement for all the people who refuse to create facebook accounts.

2) People will instantly care once you can sell your data and make money. Facebook and other advertising companies will pay for the data. Insurance companies will reduce fees for people who have pods.

I think as long a some internet users at the margins get exposed to the downsides of the asymmetrical relationship they have with bulk data collection mostly benefiting the few (and have the ability to subvert it to any degree) the digital overlords are facing a death by 1000 cuts rather than the swift blow everyone seems to expect.

Will Inrupt be the thing that brings the digital overlords to their knees? Probably not, that will be best achieved by the digital overloads themselves overtime by creating the conditions for people to even want to pursue and allocate resources for ideas (like those that Inrupt invokes in some) in the first place.

I still believe that a major change in the way data collection tactics are carried out should come from "below" (the people) rather than some incompetent digitally-challenged politician.

Practically, if all the technical challenges of Inrupt are sorted out - and I see many - this could become a standard enforced by "enlightened" governments.

This would probably take a lot of lobbying and can only work if

This is the only way as far as i'm concerned, if something is to be long lasting. People have to be living it in practice because of the inherit cost/benefits of system over another, no matter what any particular government makes a diktat for. Right now, most people are cost/benefits skewed towards the fb's (but that is slowly changing to me beacause the cost of computing continues to decline, while the knowledge of such increases at the same time as people at the margins experience higher perceived costs with the fb's).

>This would probably take a lot of lobbying and can only work if

Thats still playing the game of the giants… why play that game if trying to something new? Probably there are cheaper ways to subvert it, while making the giants pay increasing lobbying costs for ends that chip away at their power.

Assassinated mid-comment by rival lobby. RIP koevet, we hardly knew ye.

> 2) the majority of internet users are oblivious to the data collection tactics employed by half the internet and I can't picture folks raising pitchforks for "pods" to become a standard.

Both of your points are spot on.

Since #1 would only change if forced, I believe it would need to start with #2 ... which I think requires a _permanent_ social change in the perception of companies that behave like FB... Something even more potent than their recent political meddlings, something so incompatible with western political ideologies and human rights that such companies become pliable and change their business model merely to survive.

I'm not sure what the instigator for such a change is yet, but it will need to make everyone very upset...

I agree with this, but it's even worse: the majority of the remaining internet users who do have a clue about data collection, either don't care, or accept it as inevitable.

Most likely these sort of brokered accesses will be the purview of third-party data brokers who will handle your pods for you.

Lots of food for thought.

Same as always, to get services free of charge. If I want my photos to be searchable, I'm going to have to let someone run their AI on them.

As an iPhone user, I have my photos in iCloud. I'm paying for it through high device prices and storage fees.

But as Apple's business model is to sell expensive devices, they won't let me securely share my photos with my wife who doesn't own any Apple devices.

So I also upload all my photos to Google Photos where I'm benefitting from a far better AI as well.

If my photos were stored in a Solid pod, I could grant access to various service providers who use various different business models, but it would be far more flexible and easier to switch.

That's what I'm hoping for. Not sure if it will ever come to pass, but it's worth a try.

In the next month or so, that won't be true anymore if you use PhotoStructure to host your photos and videos. Disclaimer: I'm the author.

PhotoStructure is software you run, on hardware you own. It runs on desktops, docker, or headless servers, like your NAS. Your library is stored in a cross-platform, open format, so you're free to change how you host your library. I'm still enrolling beta users to try it for free in exchange for their feedback. Later this year, rather than being ad-supported, a subscription will enable advanced features (like automatic tagging based on image content).

(and as the Solid framework becomes more useable, I'll definitely try to support it).

Come on Apple.

Also, regardless of any privacy settings, Apple News keeps showing me Amazon ads for stuff I bought on Amazon. It drains my battery as well.

So I'm not really keen on using it anyway.

Would this create a society where low income persons would be perennially targeted by intrusive ads?

People on low incomes will always have fewer options and less flexibility. If we want to change that, we must change income inequality. No technology or business model will ever change that.