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Personally I don't see it as a general trend because its uneconomical and I think the notion of 'ownership of data' is confused. One issue is that local and on

Personally I don't see it as a general trend because its uneconomical and I think the notion of 'ownership of data' is confused. One issue is that local and online isn't an either/or situation. People bring up keepass and self-hosting for example, but pretty much any online pw manager stores your data both locally and online, and you can export it. Going local only or self-managing my data has no benefit to me. Second point is about control. We have encryption nowadays. I'm always confused when people hide their password vault or throw it on a next cloud home instance or something. The entire point of encryption is to enable the transport of secure data across insecure or adversarial channels. You can either own things and keep them secret, or encrypt them. Doing both kind of defeats the purpose of the latter. Third thing is that empirically speaking, Google has a better track record of not losing my stuff than I do, so I think there's also a lot of illusions going on when people think that data is more safe if they have close on hand.

mejutoco 4y ago
> The entire point of encryption is to enable the transport of secure data across insecure or adversarial channels. You can either own things and keep them secret, or encrypt them. Doing both kind of defeats the purpose of the latter. An scenario where encrypting locally makes sense is protecting confidential data when an attacker has physical access. For example, encrypting your disk so that losing your laptop in the train does not expose all your local files.
gspencley 4y ago
Google has a worse track record of not losing my stuff than I do, but admittedly I don't use too many Google services. Two examples: I had a YouTube channel that was created before Google bought YouTube and switched to using/requiring Google Accounts. That channel/account became orphaned and I could no longer gain access to it. I contacted YouTube support and the only remedy they could offer me was to serve a DMCA notice to have the content removed. I used Google Play and had bought music through the service. When they shut down the service I lost music that I had paid for. Meanwhile I still have a local mp3 library that has some content in it that has persisted on various hard drives since the 90s.

mejutoco 4y ago

> The entire point of encryption is to enable the transport of secure data across insecure or adversarial channels. You can either own things and keep them secret, or encrypt them. Doing both kind of defeats the purpose of the latter. An scenario where encrypting locally makes sense is protecting confidential data when an attacker has physical access. For example, encrypting your disk so that losing your laptop in the train does not expose all your local files.

gspencley 4y ago

Google has a worse track record of not losing my stuff than I do, but admittedly I don't use too many Google services. Two examples: I had a YouTube channel that was created before Google bought YouTube and switched to using/requiring Google Accounts. That channel/account became orphaned and I could no longer gain access to it. I contacted YouTube support and the only remedy they could offer me was to serve a DMCA notice to have the content removed. I used Google Play and had bought music through the service. When they shut down the service I lost music that I had paid for. Meanwhile I still have a local mp3 library that has some content in it that has persisted on various hard drives since the 90s.