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"He agreed with some of the report’s recommendations, such as (...) allowing consumers to take control of their data through data portability and interoperabili

"He agreed with some of the report’s recommendations, such as (...) allowing consumers to take control of their data through data portability and interoperability between platforms." This is the key. If I'm able to talk with my WhatsApp friends from Signal, or migrate my whole Facebook account to another platform, it would make it much harder for the companies to create and keep their monopolies. If I were a lawmaker, I'd focus my time on how to do this properly.

Craighead 6y ago
No thanks, Whatsapp can stay in Whatsapp
cblconfederate 6y ago
this is user-generated content and it should belong to the user, i.e. they should be able to export it in an interchangeable format, like we had RSS a long time ago. But it would also mean the end of lock-in for many companies, so i don't think they 'll allow it
- Someone 6y ago
  We already have export in interchangeable format, because of the GDPR, but it doesn’t make people move their data because it’s difficult, and often, there isn’t really anywhere to move it to. What would you import your Facebook data, your Strava tracks, etc. into? Even if there were a product with feature parity, your friends still would be on Facebook, and all your old URLs would die.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    Right now that data is not truly equivalent. E.g. twitter/fb have email addresses, and use them to notify friends, but they won't give you your followers' email list. There could be a way to ask your followers to give them for example, or at least a hash of it, so they can be discovered in another network. The issue here is that whatever value is in friend lists /subscribers is locked into these companies, but in reality it's the users who have earned it.
twblalock 6y ago
There is a privacy problem there. If I can export my social graph from Facebook, that isn't just information about me -- if you are my friend, then my graph also contains information about you (specifically, that you are my friend). If enough of your other friends export their social graphs too, then it wouldn't be too hard to reconstruct yours, even though you never exported it yourself or intended to share that information with other social networks.
- Retric 6y ago
  Nothing on Facebook is private right now. So, what exactly are you concerned about? I can see the SPAM argument, but splitting things up across multiple networks makes it harder to reconstruct your social graph. Either way getting access to a single site gives access to your fiends, but now you need to compromise multiple sites to gets your friends of friends list.
zanny 6y ago
When you go down this rabbit hole enough though you realize how totally inept pretty much every government has been in facilitating standards and supporting infrastructural software throughout the tech sector since its inception. Projects like BSD, ARPANET, etc were largely public money going into public software that was liberally licensed. Huge swathes of modern tech are built on foundations of public funding. But by and large today there is absolutely no interest or investment at the state actor level into infrastructural software - Linux is built by corporate involvement, html by whatwg, and fundamental technologies like how ubiquitous Blink and V8 are becoming throughout the software stack are corporations acting as authorities on structural software because public actors have totally failed to fill a necessary role in providing these interoperabilities for decades. The IETF was publicly funded before 93 but became a nonprofit thereafter. There are now dozens of similar foundations relying on largely corporate sponsorship to develop standards - new ones like Matrix, old ones like XMPP, or are just largely dumps of corporate will on our collective experience like PDF. Activitypub is a W3C standard but the W3C is basically a private club for university departments at this point. Again, it had public funding and involvement in the 90s that atrophied over time. The consequences of our fragment ecosystems built largely on lock-in for-profit motives have wasted a billion man hours of human labor reinventing the same wheels and have produced a software ecosystem where free software is predated by the most powerful and wealthy companies to ever exist on Earth to produce insane profits never before realized. And its largely a consequence of totally non-existent climates of public infrastructural software development being funded and paid for by tax revenues. If humanity survives in some form long term future generations will look back at this period and ask "how were these monkeys so stupid as to not collectivize coherent standards and have them deployed ubiquitously to make the benefits of software more available to all and to push the envelope of progress faster?" Hell the premier way to do complex research or theoretical experiments in software today is with CUDA, a holistically proprietary toy of Nvidia used to sell 5000% marked up workstation graphics cards because public institutions have been totally unable to even recognize that's a problem let alone do anything about it. Its a problem the west is having in many industries. The cult like idolization of the profit motive as a means to every end means roads crumble, bridges collapse, Internet infrastructure goes undeveloped, transit is nonexistent, housing is a nightmare, and software is in a perpetual wild-west state of eating itself reinventing the same wheels in perpetuity to try to appease gambling addict shareholders.

Craighead 6y ago

No thanks, Whatsapp can stay in Whatsapp

cblconfederate 6y ago

this is user-generated content and it should belong to the user, i.e. they should be able to export it in an interchangeable format, like we had RSS a long time ago. But it would also mean the end of lock-in for many companies, so i don't think they 'll allow it

Someone 6y ago
We already have export in interchangeable format, because of the GDPR, but it doesn’t make people move their data because it’s difficult, and often, there isn’t really anywhere to move it to. What would you import your Facebook data, your Strava tracks, etc. into? Even if there were a product with feature parity, your friends still would be on Facebook, and all your old URLs would die.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Right now that data is not truly equivalent. E.g. twitter/fb have email addresses, and use them to notify friends, but they won't give you your followers' email list. There could be a way to ask your followers to give them for example, or at least a hash of it, so they can be discovered in another network. The issue here is that whatever value is in friend lists /subscribers is locked into these companies, but in reality it's the users who have earned it.

twblalock 6y ago

There is a privacy problem there. If I can export my social graph from Facebook, that isn't just information about me -- if you are my friend, then my graph also contains information about you (specifically, that you are my friend). If enough of your other friends export their social graphs too, then it wouldn't be too hard to reconstruct yours, even though you never exported it yourself or intended to share that information with other social networks.

Retric 6y ago
Nothing on Facebook is private right now. So, what exactly are you concerned about? I can see the SPAM argument, but splitting things up across multiple networks makes it harder to reconstruct your social graph. Either way getting access to a single site gives access to your fiends, but now you need to compromise multiple sites to gets your friends of friends list.

zanny 6y ago

When you go down this rabbit hole enough though you realize how totally inept pretty much every government has been in facilitating standards and supporting infrastructural software throughout the tech sector since its inception. Projects like BSD, ARPANET, etc were largely public money going into public software that was liberally licensed. Huge swathes of modern tech are built on foundations of public funding. But by and large today there is absolutely no interest or investment at the state actor level into infrastructural software - Linux is built by corporate involvement, html by whatwg, and fundamental technologies like how ubiquitous Blink and V8 are becoming throughout the software stack are corporations acting as authorities on structural software because public actors have totally failed to fill a necessary role in providing these interoperabilities for decades. The IETF was publicly funded before 93 but became a nonprofit thereafter. There are now dozens of similar foundations relying on largely corporate sponsorship to develop standards - new ones like Matrix, old ones like XMPP, or are just largely dumps of corporate will on our collective experience like PDF. Activitypub is a W3C standard but the W3C is basically a private club for university departments at this point. Again, it had public funding and involvement in the 90s that atrophied over time. The consequences of our fragment ecosystems built largely on lock-in for-profit motives have wasted a billion man hours of human labor reinventing the same wheels and have produced a software ecosystem where free software is predated by the most powerful and wealthy companies to ever exist on Earth to produce insane profits never before realized. And its largely a consequence of totally non-existent climates of public infrastructural software development being funded and paid for by tax revenues. If humanity survives in some form long term future generations will look back at this period and ask "how were these monkeys so stupid as to not collectivize coherent standards and have them deployed ubiquitously to make the benefits of software more available to all and to push the envelope of progress faster?" Hell the premier way to do complex research or theoretical experiments in software today is with CUDA, a holistically proprietary toy of Nvidia used to sell 5000% marked up workstation graphics cards because public institutions have been totally unable to even recognize that's a problem let alone do anything about it. Its a problem the west is having in many industries. The cult like idolization of the profit motive as a means to every end means roads crumble, bridges collapse, Internet infrastructure goes undeveloped, transit is nonexistent, housing is a nightmare, and software is in a perpetual wild-west state of eating itself reinventing the same wheels in perpetuity to try to appease gambling addict shareholders.