[jonbronson]

As both a gmail user and developer interested in applications to help me manage my personal information, this is incredibly depressing to hear.

The idea of a verification process itself is great, and I applaud that effort. But some of these barriers seems put in place solely to kill competition and prevent startups from filling the personal data needs before Google comes up with its own plan.

These exorbitant fees of $15,000 and $75,000 are completely unjustifiable.

[Klathmon]

It's the direction that everyone seems to be moving. Wall up the gardens, remove your own access to your information, and remove the ability to share and integrate across platforms.

The weird thing is how quickly the sentiment turned from my perspective. I felt like one day most technical people applauded the ability to have total real-time access to your data, to be able to write code or use open source code to plug into these systems and augment them for better. To be able to have a startup or small company write software that can work with your google/facebook/apple/whatever account and use the information there in new ways.

Then all of a sudden (I feel like it was between 1-2 years ago, but I can also barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday so don't quote me on that!), technical people started slamming companies for "allowing someone to access their data", I saw lots of headlines about how it was unethical for Facebook to allow users to share their information with other companies (don't get me wrong, facebook does plenty wrong, but to call out the ability to share info specifically seemed so wrong). Then APIs started shutting down, access is now only allowed for other big players, and it's getting harder and harder to integrate outside of a single player's walled garden.

I get why the companies are doing it (someone told them the only ethical thing was to lock users in!?), but I don't get why HN and other technical circles are applauding it. Maybe i'm on the wrong side of history here, but I just feel like it's never a bad thing to allow me to share my information if I want. I think it should be clearly defined what i'm sharing, I think it should be obvious that i'm sharing it, and I think that some auditing and controls are obviously a good thing, but not this almost absolute shutdown of any ability for me to export or use information from these services on my own.

But maybe I'm really in a bubble, and maybe users really shouldn't be given the choice to share their personal information, but it just feels so wrong and so "holier than thou" to make that choice for them.

[jeromegv]

You're confusing 2 things.

Facebook shared data on millions of users to Cambridge Analytica. I never gave my consent, you never did.

It is a different matter than having open APIs that allow you to get your own data out of Facebook.

I want to be able to get my own data on Facebook through open APIs. What I don't want is for Facebook to give away my data to other people without my consent. You can advocate for those 2 things at the same time.

[londons_explore]

Both cases are the same.

Alice sends Bob an email and Bob then shares it with an evil 3rd party spell check extension... Alice's privacy has now been breached without her consent.

Alice posts her contact info to her wall, and her friend Bob (who has read access) shares it with a third party (Cambridge Analytica). Alice's privacy has now been breached without her consent.

Cambridge analytica collected the bulk of their private data with the consent of a friend of the victim.

[pmontra]

You're in part right. In Europe GDPR requires companies to get consent to share data, so it's still possible. Furthermore it requires them to let users (the owners of the data) extract their own data in some common format. That can be used to migrate to other services. However GDPR doesn't require real time webhooks and this is where you're right: no APIs and wallet gardens are a pain. There is an EU directive [1] that is forcing banks to provide open APIs, but that's only one vertical.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/payment-services-psd-2-directi...

[pwodhouse]

The difference is that the internet happened and it became way too easy for anyone in the world to exfiltrate all your data with a simple free program. This is why we can't have nice things.