5 ms·

I think this list makes a case for better sharing/access controls but I can see applications for most of the things listed here. I might just want the insights

I think this list makes a case for better sharing/access controls but I can see applications for most of the things listed here. I might just want the insights for myself but not want to share it with anyone or my data being sold without my consent e.g. monitor and improve my sleeping habits, monitor my expenditure by tracking my restaurant and shopping habits, my health data and/or insights into it. Maybe not your spouse but some parents might want to keep track of what their kids do online. I know people who want to have the ability to find/track the location of family members etc. I suppose calls for better regulation, purpose oriented data collection and stricter enforcement and penalties but by no means does simply don't track/collect data is an answer where there are actual practical applications.

nitrogen 5y ago
don't track/collect data Only two of your examples (parental controls and location sharing) require any kind of network, and those could be done with a private VPN running at home. The design of cloud-based services is purely for convenience and collection. Sometimes if the collection can be controlled, the convenience is worth it, but every beneficial algorithm could be run locally.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  An example here for "run locally" would be Apple Health, which uses end-to-end encryption to sync data between your devices, does all the analytics stuff locally, and has a extensive permissions scheme for voluntary sharing of info with doctors or research programs.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  The funny thing is that the rise of cloud computing coincides with the rise of really powerful cheap personal computation, you'd think it would be the opposite.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    What "the cloud" offers that personal servers don't is: - Reliability. The cloud is available with little or no downtime, to 5-8 nines (5 minutes to 1/3 of a second of downtime per year). Each nine costs roughly 10x the previous one. - Bandwidth. Residential service may work for your own personal file transfer needs, but if you're sharing to the world, even a modest degree of traffic results in a hug-of-death. - Security. Ideally, cloud systems are managed and monitored against network attacks, as well as affording physical security practices. - Updates. This becomes Somebody Else's Problem. - Ongoing development. Dittos. It's not that these aren't addressible by individuals, but it's a lot of effort to do so, and at population levels, people are simply unlikely to be able or willing to do so. A small percentage, yes. The vast majority? No. Raw compute power is a tiny fraction of the concerns involved in service hosting.
  - KirillPanov 5y ago
    I'm not so sure about that. Smartphones are a massive leap forward in low-power/energy-efficiency, but my 2013 desktop machine (KGPE-D16) still creams every smartphone ever manufactured on any metric other than power consumption. I'm kinda tired of hearing nontechnical people congratulate themselves on having a "supercomputer" in their pocket.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Compared to the supercomputers of the 1980s (if I remember right my dad had an old copy of Journal of the American Meteorological Society I found as a kid, with an ad for Cray talking about one gigaflop being state of the art), they're not wrong.
      - KirillPanov 5y ago
        Nobody calls graphing calculators "supercomputers" even though that's what they would've been in the 1960s.

nitrogen 5y ago

don't track/collect data Only two of your examples (parental controls and location sharing) require any kind of network, and those could be done with a private VPN running at home. The design of cloud-based services is purely for convenience and collection. Sometimes if the collection can be controlled, the convenience is worth it, but every beneficial algorithm could be run locally.

crooked-v 5y ago
An example here for "run locally" would be Apple Health, which uses end-to-end encryption to sync data between your devices, does all the analytics stuff locally, and has a extensive permissions scheme for voluntary sharing of info with doctors or research programs.
TchoBeer 5y ago
The funny thing is that the rise of cloud computing coincides with the rise of really powerful cheap personal computation, you'd think it would be the opposite.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  What "the cloud" offers that personal servers don't is: - Reliability. The cloud is available with little or no downtime, to 5-8 nines (5 minutes to 1/3 of a second of downtime per year). Each nine costs roughly 10x the previous one. - Bandwidth. Residential service may work for your own personal file transfer needs, but if you're sharing to the world, even a modest degree of traffic results in a hug-of-death. - Security. Ideally, cloud systems are managed and monitored against network attacks, as well as affording physical security practices. - Updates. This becomes Somebody Else's Problem. - Ongoing development. Dittos. It's not that these aren't addressible by individuals, but it's a lot of effort to do so, and at population levels, people are simply unlikely to be able or willing to do so. A small percentage, yes. The vast majority? No. Raw compute power is a tiny fraction of the concerns involved in service hosting.
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. Smartphones are a massive leap forward in low-power/energy-efficiency, but my 2013 desktop machine (KGPE-D16) still creams every smartphone ever manufactured on any metric other than power consumption. I'm kinda tired of hearing nontechnical people congratulate themselves on having a "supercomputer" in their pocket.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Compared to the supercomputers of the 1980s (if I remember right my dad had an old copy of Journal of the American Meteorological Society I found as a kid, with an ad for Cray talking about one gigaflop being state of the art), they're not wrong.
    - KirillPanov 5y ago
      Nobody calls graphing calculators "supercomputers" even though that's what they would've been in the 1960s.