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Recently I was wondering what if all our phones and computers all connected to our own personal "platform" that we have full control over. Route everything on

by fouc 8y ago

Recently I was wondering what if all our phones and computers all connected to our own personal "platform" that we have full control over. Route everything on the phone through a personal platform. Gain control of location, IP, maps caching, etc. Centralize at a personal level.

CalRobert 8y ago
To an extent, this is kind of the idea behind sandstorm.io. Run the services you want on a box under your control (or a vps, but still yours). Given that there are finally good non-google options for a lot of these (OSM + Thunderforest + Graphhopper gives a really nice map experience for instance) I'd love to see it go further. As always, it's hard to find time to work on this though.
nwienert 8y ago
I’m working on almost this exact thing. Still a ways off but get in touch if interested.
close04 8y ago
A platform is useful for the other services it provides: Google funnels your data but give you better search, MS swipes some info about your PC to give you better drivers, Facebook takes all your likes and dislikes to give you stories to your taste. [talking about stated interest here] What would your personal platform do? How would it take that data and turn it into something useful while also removing the privacy concerns? Best you can do is have something that blocks or spoofs that data before sending it to the "collector". So you gain the privacy and you lose on the service improvement. If this is legitimate concern you can try to drop the most intrusive platforms from your digital life. These would most likely be Google and Facebook. Alternatively there are options for you to use with more limited effect: ad and tracker blockers, secure or anonymous browsers, VPN, stricter privacy settings on your devices, etc. The end result is usually the same: the less data you provide them, the less useful their service is. Which makes trading your info even less enticing.
- ACS_Solver 8y ago
  Yeah, that's the crux of the matter. I'm one of the rare (outside the HN bubble at least) tech users who try hard to retain control of data and avoid cloud providers. I've never used Gmail, I have a Google account but almost never sign into it, I don't have a Facebook account, I aggressively block ads, tracking scripts, etc, etc. It seems like the main cost I'm paying for that isn't the setup effort (setting up a mail server for instance is mostly a one-time effort), it's the lack of some really neat features. I don't get Google alerts relevant to items on my calendar, the photos I take with my phone stay there until I manually transfer them to my PC, I don't have an easy way to look up which restaurant I visited in another city 2 years ago, and the list keeps getting bigger. I really like the idea of having centralization at a personal level, but it seems like the most you can get out of it is fairly hassle-free synchronization of your stuff between devices. Which is nice, but I don't see how it could provide Google-style features that are useful mainly because of the aggregation of many gigabytes of user data per day.
  - close04 8y ago
    Yeah, that's what I was also curious about: to what extent can you use the data you collect from yourself to get some genuinely useful outcome? How do I get a better news feed, search results, restaurant recommendations, etc. using the data on my personal platform? Because there are 2 sides of this issue: not giving up your data and using it productively.
    - ACS_Solver 8y ago
      One thing that seems reasonably possible is to get restaurant recommendations if you built your own app for that. You'd have to tag restaurants you enjoy or frequent manually, in order to avoid providing location data to Google, but with that input you could rank restaurants in any area by how similar they are to your preferred places. This has some complications anyway because Google Places API, if you rely on that, doesn't provide access to all the tags you see in Google Maps, and you'd have to replace some of that with freeform text search. But stuff like search results? Auto-tagging items/locations in your photos? I was very impressed by the stuff Google Photos can do, but those features obviously rely on some very well-trained neural networks. If there existed a promising "personal platform" solution, I'd happily support it by donating and hopefully code contributions, but I'm not aware of anything much better than Owncloud, which itself isn't dramatically different than using rsync/duplicity in cron jobs.
sneak 8y ago
Your carrier still has your location logs, sells them to third parties, and provides them to the government upon request. You cannot meaningfully control this data.

by fouc 8y ago

CalRobert 8y ago

To an extent, this is kind of the idea behind sandstorm.io. Run the services you want on a box under your control (or a vps, but still yours). Given that there are finally good non-google options for a lot of these (OSM + Thunderforest + Graphhopper gives a really nice map experience for instance) I'd love to see it go further. As always, it's hard to find time to work on this though.

nwienert 8y ago

I’m working on almost this exact thing. Still a ways off but get in touch if interested.

close04 8y ago

A platform is useful for the other services it provides: Google funnels your data but give you better search, MS swipes some info about your PC to give you better drivers, Facebook takes all your likes and dislikes to give you stories to your taste. [talking about stated interest here] What would your personal platform do? How would it take that data and turn it into something useful while also removing the privacy concerns? Best you can do is have something that blocks or spoofs that data before sending it to the "collector". So you gain the privacy and you lose on the service improvement. If this is legitimate concern you can try to drop the most intrusive platforms from your digital life. These would most likely be Google and Facebook. Alternatively there are options for you to use with more limited effect: ad and tracker blockers, secure or anonymous browsers, VPN, stricter privacy settings on your devices, etc. The end result is usually the same: the less data you provide them, the less useful their service is. Which makes trading your info even less enticing.

ACS_Solver 8y ago
Yeah, that's the crux of the matter. I'm one of the rare (outside the HN bubble at least) tech users who try hard to retain control of data and avoid cloud providers. I've never used Gmail, I have a Google account but almost never sign into it, I don't have a Facebook account, I aggressively block ads, tracking scripts, etc, etc. It seems like the main cost I'm paying for that isn't the setup effort (setting up a mail server for instance is mostly a one-time effort), it's the lack of some really neat features. I don't get Google alerts relevant to items on my calendar, the photos I take with my phone stay there until I manually transfer them to my PC, I don't have an easy way to look up which restaurant I visited in another city 2 years ago, and the list keeps getting bigger. I really like the idea of having centralization at a personal level, but it seems like the most you can get out of it is fairly hassle-free synchronization of your stuff between devices. Which is nice, but I don't see how it could provide Google-style features that are useful mainly because of the aggregation of many gigabytes of user data per day.
- close04 8y ago
  Yeah, that's what I was also curious about: to what extent can you use the data you collect from yourself to get some genuinely useful outcome? How do I get a better news feed, search results, restaurant recommendations, etc. using the data on my personal platform? Because there are 2 sides of this issue: not giving up your data and using it productively.
  - ACS_Solver 8y ago
    One thing that seems reasonably possible is to get restaurant recommendations if you built your own app for that. You'd have to tag restaurants you enjoy or frequent manually, in order to avoid providing location data to Google, but with that input you could rank restaurants in any area by how similar they are to your preferred places. This has some complications anyway because Google Places API, if you rely on that, doesn't provide access to all the tags you see in Google Maps, and you'd have to replace some of that with freeform text search. But stuff like search results? Auto-tagging items/locations in your photos? I was very impressed by the stuff Google Photos can do, but those features obviously rely on some very well-trained neural networks. If there existed a promising "personal platform" solution, I'd happily support it by donating and hopefully code contributions, but I'm not aware of anything much better than Owncloud, which itself isn't dramatically different than using rsync/duplicity in cron jobs.

sneak 8y ago

Your carrier still has your location logs, sells them to third parties, and provides them to the government upon request. You cannot meaningfully control this data.