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I meticulously entered my lab results, height, weight, etc into Google health few years back. And they promptly discontinued the service. What is the guarantee

I meticulously entered my lab results, height, weight, etc into Google health few years back. And they promptly discontinued the service. What is the guarantee that this will not meet the same faith? I am not buying into this unless they make it open source -- so that somebody else can take over when Google loses interest.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> What is the guarantee that this will not meet the same faith? There's generally no guarantee that any service anyone provides won't be discontinued. Either (1) the service provider is prepared to jettison services that end up becoming net money losers (and thus, its services are at risk of being discontinued voluntarily), or (2) the service provider is not particularly concerned about being able to sustain itself (and thus, its services are at an elevated risk of being discontinued involuntarily). There is not a third option. > I am not buying into this unless they make it open source -- so that somebody else can take over when Google loses interest. Open sourcing the implementation is kind of orthogonal to providing a transition path for the data so that what has been captured for any user can move to a new provider's system. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for that.
lern_too_spel 12y ago
I don't understand this sentiment that always pops up on posts about new Google services. Google allows you to download your data and take it with you, so if Google abandons the service, you can go elsewhere pretty easily. This is not the case with a bunch of other services I use, yet I never see such posts about them. The data mining criticisms hold a lot more weight but only in cases where they collect more data than is necessary to run the service. That's why paying for Fastmail doesn't make any sense. You're still trusting somebody else with your unencrypted email data. In this case though, I don't see the value-add that Google provides in having unencrypted access to the fitness data. It looks like a fairly dumb data store, in which case most of the data can be encrypted with a user password before being sent to Google.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> What is the guarantee that this will not meet the same faith? There's generally no guarantee that any service anyone provides won't be discontinued. Either (1) the service provider is prepared to jettison services that end up becoming net money losers (and thus, its services are at risk of being discontinued voluntarily), or (2) the service provider is not particularly concerned about being able to sustain itself (and thus, its services are at an elevated risk of being discontinued involuntarily). There is not a third option. > I am not buying into this unless they make it open source -- so that somebody else can take over when Google loses interest. Open sourcing the implementation is kind of orthogonal to providing a transition path for the data so that what has been captured for any user can move to a new provider's system. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for that.

lern_too_spel 12y ago

I don't understand this sentiment that always pops up on posts about new Google services. Google allows you to download your data and take it with you, so if Google abandons the service, you can go elsewhere pretty easily. This is not the case with a bunch of other services I use, yet I never see such posts about them. The data mining criticisms hold a lot more weight but only in cases where they collect more data than is necessary to run the service. That's why paying for Fastmail doesn't make any sense. You're still trusting somebody else with your unencrypted email data. In this case though, I don't see the value-add that Google provides in having unencrypted access to the fitness data. It looks like a fairly dumb data store, in which case most of the data can be encrypted with a user password before being sent to Google.