4 ms·

Could ellaborate why is illusory?

by brachi 8y ago

wmf 8y ago
Data centers and (paid) cloud vendors don't look at your data and the police can get into your home as easily as your VM.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  Nope, they can't. There are reasonably-strong legal protections against police entering your home, because it's the main place where you actually have a legally-acknowledged expectation of privacy.
  - dboreham 8y ago
    Hence “But her emails...”
  - beat 8y ago
    Most people have no real reason to be concerned about police looking at their data, even if it does somehow happen (not in America, anyway). So as a need, it's a vanishingly small market, limited to people who actually have something illegal to hide - drug business, child porn, whatever. As a want is a different thing - people, convinced to be afraid of Big Brother, want to shield themselves. But that's still not a very large market, when it comes to people paranoid enough to actually do something about it. If I had data that I legit feared the government finding, I wouldn't be protecting it with a home server - I'd protect it by encrypting the crap out of it and storing it on a pretty generic cloud service, not in my home or anything easily traceable to me.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      Nope, you're thinking of this backwards. The people who actually have something illegal to hide might actually try to do what you're saying here, make it untraceable somehow (at non-trivial risk and expense, of course!). But if what you're worried about is more casual, warrant-less invasion of privacy by your government (that isn't motivated by something as blatantly illegal as the examples you chose), "just store it at home" is a no-brainer.
    - kjetilk 8y ago
      Right, but if you had data that were just that confidential to you, that's the easy part. Just encrypt it and don't let anybody look. I don't really have that kind of data, but I do have a lot of stuff that's just private, in the sense that I don't have anything to hide, but I close the door when I'm in the toilet. So, really private data, encrypt it, store copies in many safe places, you're done. That's not really what Solid is about. Solid is not just about me, it is about us. The stuff we do together. The sharing we do, but we share not just with anybody, but with someone we trust. It may be something really trivial: I share my grocery shopping list with my wife. It is not sensitive by any means, but it is also nobody else's business. Those are data used on my terms. Nobody should be peeking into my life to map me, as I go along with my daily business, but my daily business consists of interacting with a lot of people, and I do share and I want to share, but I want personal data control. Now, personal data control is really the key to permissionless innovation. So, we're not just doing it to protect from snooping, once people have their data then you get a level playing field were there can be competition for the best user experiences.
  - rococode 8y ago
    Aren't there similarly-strong legal protections against police entering a data center and accessing servers?
    - misttar 8y ago
      Not really. There are protections in both cases. But they are different. For instance, in the USA, there is no requirement that you have a mechanism to provide information stored at home to law enforcement, even under warrant/court order. If you have one, they can compel you to use it, but if you don't they have no remediation. But a cloud provider is legally required to have that mechanism, and when order if they don't exercise it, they are punished. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act.

Could ellaborate why is illusory?

by brachi 8y ago

Could ellaborate why is illusory?

wmf 8y ago

Data centers and (paid) cloud vendors don't look at your data and the police can get into your home as easily as your VM.

zozbot123 8y ago
Nope, they can't. There are reasonably-strong legal protections against police entering your home, because it's the main place where you actually have a legally-acknowledged expectation of privacy.
- dboreham 8y ago
  Hence “But her emails...”
- beat 8y ago
  Most people have no real reason to be concerned about police looking at their data, even if it does somehow happen (not in America, anyway). So as a need, it's a vanishingly small market, limited to people who actually have something illegal to hide - drug business, child porn, whatever. As a want is a different thing - people, convinced to be afraid of Big Brother, want to shield themselves. But that's still not a very large market, when it comes to people paranoid enough to actually do something about it. If I had data that I legit feared the government finding, I wouldn't be protecting it with a home server - I'd protect it by encrypting the crap out of it and storing it on a pretty generic cloud service, not in my home or anything easily traceable to me.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    Nope, you're thinking of this backwards. The people who actually have something illegal to hide might actually try to do what you're saying here, make it untraceable somehow (at non-trivial risk and expense, of course!). But if what you're worried about is more casual, warrant-less invasion of privacy by your government (that isn't motivated by something as blatantly illegal as the examples you chose), "just store it at home" is a no-brainer.
  - kjetilk 8y ago
    Right, but if you had data that were just that confidential to you, that's the easy part. Just encrypt it and don't let anybody look. I don't really have that kind of data, but I do have a lot of stuff that's just private, in the sense that I don't have anything to hide, but I close the door when I'm in the toilet. So, really private data, encrypt it, store copies in many safe places, you're done. That's not really what Solid is about. Solid is not just about me, it is about us. The stuff we do together. The sharing we do, but we share not just with anybody, but with someone we trust. It may be something really trivial: I share my grocery shopping list with my wife. It is not sensitive by any means, but it is also nobody else's business. Those are data used on my terms. Nobody should be peeking into my life to map me, as I go along with my daily business, but my daily business consists of interacting with a lot of people, and I do share and I want to share, but I want personal data control. Now, personal data control is really the key to permissionless innovation. So, we're not just doing it to protect from snooping, once people have their data then you get a level playing field were there can be competition for the best user experiences.
- rococode 8y ago
  Aren't there similarly-strong legal protections against police entering a data center and accessing servers?
  - misttar 8y ago
    Not really. There are protections in both cases. But they are different. For instance, in the USA, there is no requirement that you have a mechanism to provide information stored at home to law enforcement, even under warrant/court order. If you have one, they can compel you to use it, but if you don't they have no remediation. But a cloud provider is legally required to have that mechanism, and when order if they don't exercise it, they are punished. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act.